Dust? Anyone? No?

I take a lot of photos with my D200. I have over 3,800 photos on Flickr, and over 26,000 on my PC.  Some of these are good, but many are bad! Regardless, I really enjoy photography.

Since I change lenses quite frequently, it was only going to be a matter of time until I got dust on the CCD. Somehow, while taking photos last weekend, I managed to get a huge particle stuck on my CCD which was so large it was visible in almost every photo I took! Nightmare!

Although I could spend time cloning it out on every photo, I don’t like to alter my photos other than tweaking them in Lightroom. It was clearly time to get my CCD cleaned.

There’s two options: Send it off for repair, or buy a product and clean it myself. Well, there’s obviously no fun in getting someone else to do it, so after a bit of research I bought a SensorKlear kit by LensPen. I didn’t fancy messing around with swabs and cleaning solution, so a dry solution like SensorKlear seemed ideal. Besides, their LensPens are excellent.

Before starting on cleaning the CCD, I decide it might be a rather good idea to see how other people fared when cleaning their sensor. I don’t want to go into this blind, and end up scratching the CCD or anything like that.
So, after reading a few anecdotes about the shutter breaking when randomly closing on the brush, and hence ending up with a very expensive paperweight, I’m wondering if this is a particularly bad decision. Well, I might as well see how bad my CCD is first. Perhaps I can live with it! So I take a photo:

Argh! It’s absolutely covered in dust and random bits of debris and bellybutton fluff!

There’s no way I can leave it like this, especially since I’m going to a friend’s wedding this evening, where I’m bound to take a few hundred photos of drunken people.. so I decide to throw caution to the wind and clean it. After all what could possibly go wrong?

After locking up the mirror, I start with the blower, with pretty good results. It removes the larger particles, but not all of the dust. It’s time to actually touch the CCD with the sensor cleaning pen. This is the scary bit.

With visions of the shutter closing on the pen and shattering the CCD into a thousand expensive pieces, I gingerly touch the CCD with the tip of the pen. Nothing breaks. Motivated by trepidation, I quickly move the pen over the CCD with the most gentle movement, before connecting the lens and taking another test shot.

It’s worse! Unbelievable! Somehow I’ve managed to get more crap all over the CCD. Unless I’ve damaged it..? Panicking I remove the lens, lock up the mirror and clean it with the pen again.  Ah. I had forgotten to use the blower after using the pen last time, which would explain why there was even more rubbish present.
Since using the blower means there’s no physical contact with the CCD, I give it a prolonged blasting. Another test shot reveals that the CCD is now almost clean:

Well, that’ll do for me. There’s a few spots that the pen might clear, but I think that’s enough for now.

My advice is, if you want to clean your CCD, try using a blower on it first. They’re pretty cheap, but make sure you get one that’s designed for use inside the camera. This means they have a filter, sometimes a rubberised tip, and don’t have any traces of oils inside that can be blown out and onto the CCD. Whatever you do DO NOT USE A CAN OF COMPRESSED AIR. If you’re brave enough, actually cleaning the CCD with a SensorKlear pen isn’t too scary.

Remember though – you may well be voiding your warranty if you try this. You could end up with an extremely expensive, unpractical, and unwanted paperweight!

I bought mine from eBay.