Camera Cleaning

This a quick post of cleaning my D7000.  First off I tend to not be as gentle with my camera as I should.  Heck take a look at photo-journalist, they live by their cameras but they also don't coddle them.  (Yes I understand that they use professional grade equipment and the build on them is much more sturdy, titanium and all.)  But the pro-sumer camera or even high-end consumer camera should be a bit more durable than say a point and shoot.  (Again with the fewer moving parts of a point and shoot, they can tend to be very durable.)  So with that being said I try to be careful but I do tend to take the camera to various locations.  The beach is a good example, how do you change lens at the beach especially with it blowing up an ocean breeze?  Once you remove the lens, does the camera body face down?  Or up?  Try to stand with your back to the wind?  Get dust and worst sand in the camera or on the lens?  Heaven forbid you get any sand on your hands, it is on the camera at that point thus when you change lens you could have sand falling off the lens or camera.

Typically I try to have the camera face down and stand with my back to the wind.  But even doing that, where do you place the lens you just removed?  How many caps do you remove from the lens you are changing to?  Where do set the lens?  If you are alone, this makes a difference and if you try to pack it back into a bag, that takes time, meaning the camera could be exposed.  If you cap the camera, you have to keep track of the caps.  (Heck, I lost my lens cap just because it hit against my body just right and popped off while I was hiking.  (I, my wife and daughter all tried to find it retracing our steps but could not.  I already have a UV/clear filter on the lens to protect it, old school.  And it has protected the lens from ocean spray and it even needed to be replaced, which is another story.)  Anyway, reading some photographers, they dispense of the lens cap completely since they sometimes miss a shot trying to get the thing off.  Me, I tend to be more lazy but the shot excuse sounds good.

Anyway, after a year of using the camera, I noticed that in certain light conditions I had spots.  This I thought was my filter but it stayed even when I changed lenses.  Thus I figured I had dust on my sensor.  After researching and talking with some people about cleaning the sensor, I decided that I would clean it before the trip to China.  I did not relish the idea of touching up thousands of pictures.  (Note that even though only a small percentage could be considered 'professional', a large percentage can be considered family quality and even in a family quality picture, a big old dust spot is not very nice to look at.)

Some people said the only thing to do was send it in.  Other talked about cleaning it yourself.  Air.  Brush.  Cleaning solution.  I even had people tell me that they would never touch the sensor for fear of damaging it.  My take on this whole thing, I did not have the time or want to spend the money on Nikon cleaning the sensor because I knew that I would dirty it up in short order, beaches and all.  Thus I tried to do it myself.  First the air, which did not work.  I did not really want to use the brush, so I skipped that.  I guess I did have an old anti-static brush which I did try to use along with the air just in case those dust particles where attached via static.  Nope that did not work either.  Lastly I bought the Visible Dust brushes and solution.  Watched the video just to make sure that I did it correctly and wow, this really worked.  People say this is expensive but how easy it was to do and its effectiveness left me a believer.

Now a couple of things you should realize when you do this since I had and read about people scared to touch their sensor.  Yes you are cleaning your sensor in a fashion.  You are cleaning your sensor assembly.  Your sensor has an anti-alias filter in front of it and it is this piece of 'glass' that you are cleaning.  So I took this approach.  I have toyed with the idea of removing this filter, MaxMax offers the service.  But what this does is allow for a bit sharper images since the filter slightly blurs the image to cut down on the aliases affect.  (Note that the new D800 comes with and without the anti-alias filter in place for this very reason.)  So I figure worst case scenario would be I scratch the filter and send the camera to MaxMax to have the filter removed/replaced with a clear filter or with an HA filter for astronomy photography.

But the cleaning worked and my wife is grateful since I don't have an excuse to buy a new camera and the pictures I took from China and afterwards have turned out good.

America's Cup

Here are a few pictures from the America's Cup AC series race that took place here in San Francisco on August 26th.  I was again at Ft Baker thus rather far away from the action.  All these shots are at 300mm and then cropped a bit.  There where several people there trying to figure out if it would be a good vantage point to view the race and avoid the crowd.  Thus it did not really work.

These where the smaller boats, but the once they change to the bigger boats, I still do not think it would matter much.

This picture shows one of the teams practicing with the Bay Bridge as the back drop.  This is both the old Bay Bridge and the new replacement span.  The large tower is new part and should go into service in about a year.  This is the Eastern span of the Bay Bridge.

Here are more pictures with part of SF as the background.  The bridge you see is the Western span of the Bay Bridge.

Shuttle

I've been pretty busy the past month or so, thus the lack of updates.  I do have a few more posts from China and one from the America's Cup race that was held here in San Francisco.  I will hopefully get to them before the next race happens.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the shuttle Endeavor as it passed through San Francisco on its way to LA.

I was shooting from Ft Baker at the Marin headlands.  They made two passes.  The first was from the Marin side to SF parallel to the bridge.  The second was from the inland bay, out to sea, perpendicular to the bridge.