How to check for dust on sensor before going out for Taking photos
You don’t want to go out for an important photography and then later on discover that you have dust spots on the camera sensor. It is always a good idea to check for dust on sensor before going for an important shoot. Here I am going to share a very important tip on how to check and make sure that the your camera sensor is clean and dust free.
Check for dust on sensor technique
How do you check for a clean sensor? You may just say that you take a photo of a plain white paper and review it to see if you have any dust spot on the image. It is a good step, but will just show just the big dust spots, not the tiny ones.
Then you may add that you would zoom and search for the smaller dust spots. That is good too, but what if the surface of the paper that you photographed had some spots on it! Here is a most efficient way of checking.
Checking for dust technique
1- Set your camera to manual focus. You don’t want to capture a sharp photo of the white paper. Focus the lens to infinity. With this setting whatever is on the paper is out of focus and won’t be mistaken by dust on the sensor.
2- Set your camera to the lowest ISO setting or Auto ISO.
3- Select Manual Exposure mode, set the shutter speed to around 1 second, set the aperture accordingly the make a slightly overexposed image (about one stop).
4- Point the camera to the white paper and while moving the camera up and down, take the photo.
By moving the camera you make everything from the scene (white paper) completely blurry. Now whatever spots show in the photo is definitely dust spot.
5- If you can not see any spot, zoom to the image and scan around for smaller spots.
That is all for now. Stay tuned for upcoming articles as I am going to discuss how to o clean the sensor automatically and manually, and how to use Lightroom or Photoshop to remove the dust from photos, and as always feel free to contact us if you have more questions. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for new tutorials and tips.