Confession time: I’m a bit of a clean freak. I’m not full-on obsessive, but close enough that my wife bought me the object of my desire for my 40th birthday: a Dyson vacuum cleaner (never call it a Hoover).
In fairness, I already had a garage full of motorcycles and accessories, plus a bulging bag of camera gear, so her choices were limited. While I’m often to be found cleaning the family home and everything in it, my bike and camera get special attention.
Here's what I like: things that look shiny and well looked-after. Here’s what I don’t like: dust. Dust has always been the plague of my photography. Some say that it wasn’t an issue in film photography because, every time you wound the film on for the next shot, any dust would be dragged away and you’d have a new, pristine frame of film.
These people have obviously never spent hours painstakingly ‘spotting’ their prints with a tiny paintbrush and an incumbent box of paints, removing the effects of dust. Give me Photoshop’s healing brush any day.
Even so, particles of dust on your camera’s image sensor and dirt and grime on your camera and lenses in general can be a pain. Why not set aside some time before the year kicks into full gear to have a tidy-up?
My advice for camera cleaning is ‘approach with caution’. Even if your camera or lenses have become really dirty, don’t resort to hard brushes or abrasive cloths.
First up, remove any loose dust and dirt. I use a blower bulb for this, but I shy away from compressed air cans. The high-powered blast of air from an aerosol can drive dust and moisture in through the joints of lenses and cameras, actually causing a problem that wasn’t there to start with.
After using a blower bulb, I set to with a smooth microfiber cloth. These are much better than conventional cloths, as the surface picks up and retains dust, instead of just moving it around.
Another reason to use a blower brush before a cloth is that you don’t want to scrape the front element of your lens, your camera’s rear screen or other sensitive parts by dragging hard particles of grit around their surfaces with a cloth.
For stubborn smears, greasy fingermarks or other stains on the glass surfaces of the front and rear of lenses (or on other camera parts) I tend to use specialist cleaning swabs like Zeiss Lens Wipes.
I particularly like these as they come in packs of disposable wipes so, when I’ve used one and it’s become contaminated, I just throw it away and grab another one from its sealed sachet next time around. It really is one of the best lens cleaning products on the market.
I’ve found that lens cleaning wipes and solutions work equally well on camera bodies, with one exception. I have had a couple of really old DSLRs and film cameras that I’ve rediscovered after 15 years or more, only to find that the rubber grip areas have become really sticky and unpleasant to the touch.
I’ve tried various cleaning solutions with no success, but did manage to bring them back to being good-as-new by using a microfiber cloth and some isopropyl alcohol, or ‘rubbing alcohol’. It works a treat!
The main bugbear of dust when it comes to interchangeable lens cameras is that each time you change the lens, there’s a chance of dust and debris being ingested by the camera.
Murphy’s Law states that this will end up on your image sensor, giving rise to dark spots on each and every successive frame, especially when using medium to narrow apertures.
To check for dust on your sensor, use the longest focal length or zoom setting of your lens, focus to infinity, and use a narrow aperture of around f/16. Take a few shots of a blank area of sky and check for dark spots that crop up in the same place on each frame.
Sensor cleaning is a whole subject in itself that I won’t go into here, although I can recommend some of the best image sensor cleaning kits. All I’ll say for now is use a blower brush (carefully) to start with, avoid aerosols of compressed air like the plague, and use swabs with wet cleaning solution as a last resort.
And if you’re not entirely confident about cleaning your image sensor yourself, have it done professionally by an expert. In the meantime, happy cleaning – and enjoy having some ‘new’ kit to show for your efforts.
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If you are feeling brave, find out how to clean a camera sensor – and here are our tips on cleaning a camera lens.
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