Just like many of you I am also a believer of “Prevention is better that cure”. If you can prevent your camera’s sensor from getting dusty, you will never have to look for a cure. Here are a couple of important steps you can avoid getting dust into your camera:
- Keep you camera clean. If you can; avoid working in dusty areas.
- After shooting store your camera in a clean bag i.e. free from dust.
- Keep your replacement lens ready before changing the lens. This will at least reduce the time of exposure of your camera’s optics to dust. I have seen people first removing the lens, keeping it aside, grabbing another lens from deep inside of their bag while keeping the camera optics exposed to dust. I personally call it “abusing”.
- Before replacing make sure you dust off the rear of the lens mount of the replacement lens.
- While detaching the lens, face the camera downwards so that any dust particles present in the mirror chamber fall away from the sensor not on the sensor.
- After you have attached replacement lens, put back the end cap quickly on the last lens so as to reduce the dust that might fall on it.
- User blower bulb to dust off your optics. Never ever user compressed air or vacuum.
- Blow off dust before every session else you will have to curse yourself for returning home with those tons of photos containing dust spots that were present on you sensor before you even started.
- If available use your camera’s dust reduction feature. You can specify when to run this feature automatically i.e. at the startup or at the time you shut off your camera. I prefer to run the mechanism at startup as well as at the time of shutting off. The dust reduction mechanism basically produces vibrations on or around the image sensor making dust particles fall off.
