Tips | The Retired Photographer

Since it is now bird nesting season, I usually drop my landscape photography and concentrate on bird photography for three to four months. However, I still have a couple of trips lined up during this time. One to Death Valley in early April and a Yosemite/Tioga Pass trip in June, when the pass opens to traffic. Both to satisfy my landscape photography. While shooting Black-crowned Night Herons, I noticed dust spots on my quick burst of images from my Canon 1D Mark III. Yep, on closer examination, all five images had the same dust spots as in multiple dust spots. Hmm! How did I get all these dust spots? I am very, very careful when mounting my camera body onto my lenses. No problem though, I will batch process the images to get rid of the dust spots all at once. So, I selected all five images and corrected all the dust spots in the first image of the sequence, then batch processed all five at the same time. OOPS! Not all the dust spots were corrected in all the images. How can this be??? I spent more time correcting the other four images, then went on with my life.

One day, at home, I was having lunch in the backyard watching the birds at the feeders, when I noticed all the smaller birds in the Holly tree were jumping around from branch to branch. It was the insects trying to scare the birds away from the Holly’s nectar bearing flowers. These insects were flying all over the place, mostly bees I assume. This got me to thinking. Maybe my dust spots were actually insects flying around the Eucalyptus flowering trees. I decided to take another drive out to where the Night Herons were nesting and sure enough, the Eucalyptus trees were in bloom and the insects were flying all around the tree branches.

Before you take your camera bodies down to you local camera shop or send them in to the repair station for dust cleaning, check and see if what you shoot has insects flying among your subjects. This would definitely save you a few bucks and maybe some post processing time lost.

admin :: Jun.02.2011 :: Tips :: No Comments »

A Nikon Rep mentioned that Nikon did a study on sensor dust. Nikon discovered that most photographers got sensor dust from the rear lens cap. Most photographers take off their rear lens cap then put it in their pocket or bag. Dust transfers or floats into the rear lens cap, which in turn, settles into the area around the rear element of the lens when attached. The next time you install the lens on your body and turn it on, the dust is attracted due to the electrostatic charged sensor causing your sensor dust. The best answer was to lightly blow the dust out of your rear lens cap before attaching back on your lens.

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