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Why you should keep your camera’s SENSOR super clean

April 22, 2010 by Steve Berardi 5 Comments

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

Filed Under: Tips Tagged With: accessory, active pixel sensor, camera, clean, cleaning, cloth, cmos, dirt, dirty, dust, filter, focus, glass, lens, sensor, smudge, speck, water

How to reduce noise for long exposures

June 14, 2009 by Steve Berardi 10 Comments

Photo by Steve Berardi
Photo by Steve Berardi
If not handled properly, noise can really degrade the quality of your photographs. Those pesky little dots can become a big distraction in an otherwise great photo.

You can usually avoid noise problems by shooting at a low ISO (400 or lower for most cameras), but noise becomes a problem again when using a long exposure (anything longer than one second). [Read more…] about How to reduce noise for long exposures

Filed Under: Tips Tagged With: astrophotography, exposure, how to, lake, lake tahoe, long exposure, low light, low light photography, motion, nature photography, noise reduction, noisy images, star photos, water

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