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dust

How to Switch Lenses on Your Camera

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Photo by Andrew Magill (used under the CC-Attr license)
In a previous post, I talked about the importance of being careful when switching your camera lenses, in order to avoid dust from gathering on your camera’s sensor. But I didn’t elaborate much on how to switch your lenses, so here’s my method for switching camera lenses:

  1. Put your camera on a flat surface, so that the lens is pointing straight up
  2. Unlock the lens on your camera body, and turn the lens just a little bit so you can let go of the lens and it remains unlocked (but it’s still resting on the camera body)
  3. Remove the cap on the bottom of the new lens you want on your camera
  4. Hold the new lens in your right hand, and twist off the lens on your camera with your left hand
  5. Quickly mount the new lens with your right hand and lock it onto the camera
  6. Put the cap on the bottom of the old lens

[Read more…] about How to Switch Lenses on Your Camera

What to do when you get sensor dust

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In a previous post, I talked about the importance of keeping your camera’s sensor clean. The best way to do that is to be extremely careful when you switch out lenses on your camera.

But, what if you still get a little dust on your sensor despite being super careful? [Read more…] about What to do when you get sensor dust

Why you should keep your camera’s SENSOR super clean

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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

Why you should keep your lenses super clean

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One of the consequences of shooting photos outdoors is that you’ll constantly be getting dust or dirt on your lenses and filters.

It’s easy to forget about this dust and just deal with it by removing any specks in your photos later in Photoshop, but sometimes those specks won’t always appear on a nice blue sky, so it’s important to keep your filters and lenses super clean at all times. [Read more…] about Why you should keep your lenses super clean