Running and marketing a photography and stock photo business

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Test using dust-aid sensor cleaner

At Birmingham's NEC event (see recent post) I bought some Dust-Aid DSLR camera sensor cleaner. Today I tried it out on my Pentax's K10d and istD and on my Canon EOS5d. The latter came from Canon with a dirty sensor that did not respond to my blower brush - I don't have to change lenses on this camera so it's foing to be interesting to see what happens.

I had to use a special Canon Cleaner lower tack pad on the Eos5D and the Pentax K10d. I used the same pad to do both. I used the standard pad on the Pentax istD.

This is the Canon EOS5d before...

and after

Sorry, the sky had changed! Still, a dramatic improvement with just one or two smaller marks remaining.

Here's the Pentax istD before (note bottom left)

and after

Still some specks remaining but the biggy has gone.

On the Pentax K10D the change was more subtle so I'm not reproducing the results.

At Birmingham the guy who sold me the Dust Aid said that greasier dust could remain and you needed to use Eclipse to remove that. We can see thta in the above. And the K10D with its self cleaning sensor would be expected to expel looser dust so maybe that is what happened here - what was left on the sensor was the trickier dust spots anyway.

(Note all photos are of a section of the image)

So at least now I have three relatively clean sensors. I'm particularly pleased with the Canon which had not responded to the blower brush. But will it stay clean, even though I will not be removing the lens? I've read elsewhere about manufacturing debris in some EOS5d's causing all sorts of problems. Hopefully I have a clean one now.

Labels: equipment reviews, sensor cleaning

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Focus on Imaging at Birmingham NEC

So today was the annual trip to Brum to check out whether the ratio of beards worn by photographers still is three times the national average - and yes it is!

Aside from this vital observation I trotted around getting lost several times, always somehow finishing up at the Nikon stand (is someone trying to tell me comething?).

Mulling about in my brain is the issue of where to go with the mainstay of my equipment - the DSLR. Already possessing a Pentax K10D and a Canon EOS5D it may seem strange to be considering scrapping the lot and buying a Nikon D300 (I must write more on this soon) but at least I was using the show to help me make big decisions (OK, I normally just go to take candids of the models....)

Just what was going on with all those laptops anyway?

My day was interrupted by a surprise call from a friend who works in big deals at a big city bank calling to let me know that Getty Images had just been bought by a Private Equity group. Who knows what this means but perhaps a good time to get my images in before Getty reinvents itself ("I submitted to Getty in the good old days before they accepted images from riff raff with any old camera"). After all I bought the EOS5D to fit in with them and I will be heartily pissed off if new owners open things up to the likes of me (before I owned the EOS5D, that is).

Back to the Nikon stand where a couple of guys were explaining to a couple of hundred people about the wonders of wireless TTL flash. Strangely it was pitched as if this was something Nikon had just discovered and that the audience had never heard of. Strange to a Pentax user anyway whose cameras have had this technology for 10 years now but whose marketing team have felt it appropriate to keep it all very quiet....

I'm rambling now.

Labels: awaydays, equipment reviews