Craig Fine Portraits
Atlanta, GA

Catch and removal of Dust Bunnies.

 

No matter how hard you try not to catch these little critters, they get in and multiply as fast as real bunnies if you are not careful. If you were to never remove your lens of your Digital SLR camera, they can still get in with camera models that do not have water seals, this includes many of the popular bodies made by Canon or Nikon, as well as other camera makers, but most of your pro DSLR bodies do have good seals, and if you do not change lenses, they seldom will give you problems. Myself I try to change lenses only on one of my three camera bodies, in order to keep my risk of dust bunnies down to a minimum. In the example on the right, a fellow photographer who was with me training, took this image at a wedding, he closed down the apature to f/16 and it's when you close down your apature, that they become more visable, at wide open apature settings often you will never see any problem at all. On the right is an example of what they look like, and it's with light color areas in your photo that they are the most visable. If you develope good lens changing habits, you will be able to keep them down to a minimum In most cases.

One thing to note, even if you did have actual dust in the lens, it would never show, it would only serve to make your images a bit soft.

 

To test for dust bunnies, you put the lens on manual focus, and photograph the sky or white piece of paper, with your apature closed all the way down. Take a few images, and use two different lenses if you can.

 

Then you inspect the images on your computer, because they will be hard to noice on your cameras LCD display. You will notice the spots in the same locations with two different lenses, which will help prove in your mind that it's not the lens, but dust on the sensor.

 

You can clean it yourself, and your owners manual does normally tell about the steps to do this, in order to have the sensor exposed to your using a "rocket air bulb" to blow the dust out. With the lens removed and following the camera makers instructions to expose your shutter so you can use the air bulb, hold the lens facing downward to the ground, this will aid to have the dust bunnies fall out.

Also when ever you do change a lens on your camera body, holding the opening downward is a way to keep them to a minimum, also never change lenses when doing beach portraits, bring multiple camera bodies with the lenses you feel that you will need.

 

• Never, and I mean never, used "canned" air, the propellents can freeze your sensor or other inner parts and cause a lot of damage.

 

You may find when you do this procedure to remove your dust bunnies, that you may only move some around, and others will not budge at all, depending on how long they have been there on the sensor, they can bond with time because of small amounts of humidity that is in the air. And in that case you can seek professional cleaning service unless you are very brave, myself, I would take the camera to a good camera repair facility in your area if the air bulb does not do the trick. Here in the Atlanta area, a great place to have any service done is at www.peachtreecamerarepair.com, Alan and his crew are some of the best camera repair and service professionals you will find.

 

The longer a dust bunny stays in one spot, and especially if humidity can get into your camera, the harder it will be to remove with the air bulb method.

 

If you hold the camera to blow out the dust bunnies with the camera lens opening face down, so gravity does pull the bunnies to fall out as you blow it with the Rocket air bulb, you will have the best chance to not just move the bunnies around, but actually have them removed from the area altogether.

 

 

The photographer who I got the above sample from was unable to remove the dust with the air bulb and had the camera repair center to professionaly clean his sensor, because he had a few that would not clean up.

The reason I can give Peachtree Camera Repair such a strong reccomendation is that over the past 18 years, they have serviced many of my 15 working cameras, and always done a great job, and timly repair. For working pros, they put you at the front of the line with no rush charges.

 

Normally the shop can clean and hand the camera back to you in a few minutes, and PCR charges $50 for that service. I know of several photographers who sent their camera overnight to Peachtree Camera Repair and they did the cleaning and had the camera back to them in two days.

 

You will find that 98% of the time the rocket air bulb will do the trick, and with it, there is little worry about damaging the sensor.