I have never cleaned the sensors on my cameras since I’ve owned them.

1. I never thought about it.

2. When I changed lenses outside I just held my breath sure that that would somehow keep any dust from getting in there.

Then I read how to see if your sensor has stuff on it by simply taking a photo at f/22 of the sky or a white piece of paper and you see dark spots or are just finding yourself cloning out spots in the sky of photos shot at f/22 or what ever your lens’s highest aperture is.

Well that was me. So I took my cameras to get their sensors cleaned.

 

 

Mike was awesome and cleaned sensors for those of us who were too chicken to do it our selves. He started out by putting on gloves.

 

 

Then he wiped everything down.

 

 

He then locked up the mirror.

 

 

Took this blower thing

 

 

And blew it out careful to hold the camera up so the dust will fall out and not back in.

 

 

Then he took this  looking thing, yeah, a magnifying glass sort of thing with a light

 

 

to look at the sensor and see if the blower thing did the trick.

 

 

Joe wasn’t chicken, he did his camera himself.

 

 

Next they got out a brush wiper thing,

 

 

sensor cleaner

 

 

and put drop on the wiper brush.

 

 

Mike carefully wiped it across just the sensor.

 

 

 

Then he used something called a lens pen that looks like it’s got a weird eraser on the end.

 

 

I think it’s sorta like a mini carpet sweeper and supposed to pick up stuff.

 

 

Got the blower back out

 

 

Then he used what looked to me to be an ordinary paint brush and brushed out any thing left in there.

 

 

 

Put the lens back on, took a look at the sky and we were good to go.

White balance settings have always been on my camera and I’ve always tried to use the correct one for the moment but tonight I used them to get different effects on the same shot and see what the differences were.


I first tried the setting for direct sunlight.


Then I set it to cloudy. Not a lot different but a little redish.


This is the fluorescent setting. Blue, I like that.


This is the incandescent setting. Similar to the fluorescent.


And the shade setting.
I wasted a bit of time changing settings, I changed it through the menu. Depending on your camera you may have a dedicated button you can change the white balance with.
I do, I just forget to use it.


I do shoot in JPEG and Raw so I probably could get all these effects on the computer later. I like Raw,  I went to the computer to see just what Raw can do.

This is what it looked like. All yellowy! That is not the way the sky looked. That’s when I saw I still had my white balance on direct sunlight.

Same photo AFTER. I changed the white balance with the computer and played around with every possible setting, color, hue saturation, brightness, contrast.
Hope I haven’t confused you with that but have inspired you to  play around with some of those buttons on the camera.
And don’t always follow the rules. Break a few,
just not all
Well not all,
all at the same time. 
you might get some photos you really like because of it.