Cleaning the sensor with moisture

- This week, on The Practicing Photographer, I'm going to pour liquid inside this camera. Alright, that's not really what I'm gonna do, but when you're cleaning your sensor with a wet solution, that's what it feels like. You can't help it, it feels like you've got a fire hose, because it just seems so wrong. In two previous installments of this series, you've seen me battling sensor dust. In the first installment, I went after it with a blower bulb and got rid of a lot of it. In the end of the last one, I had gone after it with a specially designed dry brush, and that got rid of a lot more.

Here's where I started, and this is a shot of the sensor, taken by putting the aperture at f/22, de-focusing the camera, and pointing it towards a bare, white wall. You can see a lot of dust spots on there. Here is where I'm at now, this is after the blower brush and the Arctic Butterfly Visible Dust brush that I used last time. It's doing pretty good, but there's just a few stubborn pieces that I can't get rid of, and this is how sensor cleaning works. You have to work your way up through these three different solutions. You start with pushing air around, then you go to a dry brush, and if that doesn't work, you go to a wet solution.

This means taking very specific cleaning solutions designed for an image sensor, putting them on very specific swabs designed for cleaning an image sensor, and brushing them along the sensor. If you're not comfortable with that kind of thing, I completely understand why. At that point, this may be the fork in the road for you, as far as sensor cleaning. It might be time to send your camera to the manufacturer to have it cleaned. If you go to their website, you will find, most likely, a form for starting this process. You fill it out, you mail your camera off.

You're usually not mailing it back to Japan, or something like that, there are service centers around the country. Then, a few days later, you get it back and the sensor's cleaned. I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna actually clean it. I have here another Visible Dust product. These are some of their swabs, and a special light for making it easier to see inside of the camera. They make a number of different products. There are lots of other companies out there that make wet sensor cleaning solutions. Visible Dust is what I've always used, so it's what I know, and I've always had good results from it.

There are different types of stains, that's what we're after, here. We don't have just loose particulate matter on the sensor anymore, we blew all that and brushed all that away. We're left with things that are stuck to the sensor, and they're stuck there either by water or oil. Water can just come in from the outside. So can oil, but more than likely, oil-based stains have come from inside the camera itself. The problem is, we can't tell what we've got here, so we just have to try something. Visible Dust makes a range of cleaning fluids that err on the side of one's aimed specifically at cleaning water, to specifically at cleaning oil, to something somewhere in the middle.

Typically, what you would do is start with one of the water-based ones, or water-targeted ones. If that doesn't work, you would work your way up the scale until you have gotten the sensor cleaned. When you are brushing a liquid onto the sensor, there's a chance, if you've ever washed a window, you know this, there's a chance that you're gonna leave streaks on the sensor. Visible Dust also makes a special streak-removal fluid that you brush on at some point. I'm not gonna through all of that. Hopefully, this first attempt is gonna get it. These swabs are single-use swabs. I'm gonna brush it on and then that's that.

The reason being, I don't want to pick up something on this swab and have it stuck there, and then go and scrape that across the sensor again. I have to be very careful with the handling of all of this. I have to be aware that my fingers have oil on them, that they might have small bits of dust on them. All of that can be transferred here, and then get transferred to the sensor. I don't want that. I'm gonna go ahead and open this up and get it ready. I am using the VDust Plus solution, which is aimed at the middle of the water to oil spectrum.

I'm having trouble getting the lid off of this. I'm worried that sensor-cleaning fluid is gonna be thrown everywhere. Alright, I have this camera in, no I don't. I need to put the camera in cleaning mode, and that's just a menu option on the back of the camera. Sensor-cleaning mode will raise the mirror, and open the shutter, and now I'm ready to go. I've got access to the sensor. Oh boy, okay, this is where it starts getting hairy. I'm gonna open one of these things up, if I can figure out which end is the open end, and then I'm gonna squirt some of this liquid on it, and then I'm gonna wipe it on the sensor.

You can see, I'm building lots of confidence in my manual dexterity by the mere fact that I can't open the cellophane packaging. Boy, the really keep things sealed, which is good, I want to be able to travel with these without them getting contaminated. Alright, here we go. As I mentioned before, Visible Dust is a company that makes cleaning materials for high-end optical devices, so they've been doing this for a while.

All I'm doing is going in here and being very careful not to touch the sides of the chamber because the sides, wow, it's like playing operation. The sides could have dust on them that could get knocked loose, and I don't want that. Lifting out very carefully, my nose didn't buzz, so apparently I got through okay. Now I'm gonna take my loupe, and see what I can see.

And that worked. This is great, I don't have to go to the more serious fluid. I'm in good shape, I've got my sensor cleaned, I'm gonna put the mirror down and get the lens back on as quickly as I can before anything else gets in there. If that hadn't worked, the next thing would be to get another swab, get the more intense solution, put it on that swab, do it again. If I get the dust off, and I go and I take a shot and I find that there's some kind of weird, new pattern, that could be streaking.

I can see that very easily with my loupe, so I would get the streak-removal solution, put that on, wipe it off. This is an involved process. We've gone through three different steps. Blower brush, the dry brush, and now the swabs. The swabs could be a multi-step process also. This is not for the faint of heart. That said, I've never not had it work, I've never damaged a camera. I've always been able to get my sensors clean, I've never had to send them in, and I spend a lot of time around sand. This is something that I encounter quite a bit, and it's always worked.

I will say that I am cleaning my sensor less than I used to, because nowadays, cameras all have built-in sensor cleaning, not all, most cameras have built-in sensor cleaning mechanisms. What that is, is a vibration of the sensor every time you power up or down that just tries to shake material off. It falls to the bottom of the camera where it's supposed to stick to a little, sticky pad down there. The Visible Dust people will say, "Well, maybe it does or doesn't." We've all seen dust motes floating in a shaft of light in the house. Dust doesn't necessarily succumb to gravity, so shaking it may just be making it loose in the camera where it's gonna stick to something else.

Nevertheless, I feel like I'm cleaning my sensor much less than I used to. These are the tools you need. Please don't use anything other than tools specifically designed for cleaning a sensor when you find out that it's dusty.