Last week, I wrote a post about why it’s important to keep your lenses clean, and included an example photo to help illustrate my point.
Well, it turns out I was wrong about what caused those dust specks in the photo: they were NOT caused by dust on the lens, but instead resulted from dust on the camera’s sensor.
I’d like to thank Eric Pohl and Michael Smith for kindly correcting my error (see their comments on the original post). And, please accept my sincere apology for being wrong about this!
As Eric and Mike pointed out in their comments, dust on your lens will rarely show up in the end photo because you’ll always be focusing much farther than the front element of your lens (which is where the dust is). Ron Brinkmann put together an excellent article with great examples that helps show this.
For dust on your lens to be visible as specks in your photo, you’d have to be focusing your lens to an extremely close distance (even closer than what most macro lenses can do). So, any specks of dust you see in your final image most likely were caused by dust on your camera’s sensor. [Read more…] about Why you should keep your camera’s SENSOR super clean