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Clean Your Sensor
Yes, the Nikon D7000 has a two-pronged sensor dust prevention scheme: an innova-
tive air control system that keeps dust away from the sensor in the first place, and a sen-
sor-shaking cleaning mechanism. But no dust-busting technology is 100-percent
effective.
Indeed, there’s no avoiding dust. No matter how careful you are, some of it is going to
settle on your camera and on the mounts of your lenses, eventually making its way inside
your camera to settle in the mirror chamber. As you take photos, the mirror flipping up
and down causes the dust to become airborne and eventually make its way past the shut-
ter curtain to come to rest on the anti-aliasing filter atop your sensor. There, dust and
particles can show up in every single picture you take at a small enough aperture to bring
the foreign matter into sharp focus. No matter how careful you are and how cleanly you
work, eventually you will get some of this dust on your camera’s sensor. Some say that
CMOS sensors, like the one found in the Nikon D7000, “attract” less dust than CCD
sensors found in cameras from other vendors. But even the cleanest-working photo-
graphers using the Nikon D7000 are far from immune.
Fortunately, one of the Nikon D7000’s most useful features is the automatic sensor
cleaning system that reduces or eliminates the need to clean your camera’s sensor man-
ually. The sensor vibrates ultrasonically each time the D7000 is powered either on or
off (or both, at your option), shaking loose any dust.
Although the automatic sensor cleaning feature operates when you power the camera
up or turn it off (depending on the behavior you specify in the Setup menu), you can
activate it manually at any time. Choose Clean Image Sensor from the Setup menu, and
select Clean Now. If you’d rather specify when automatic cleaning occurs, choose On
(clean at power up), Off (clean when the camera is switched off), On/Off (clean at both
power up and power down), or Cleaning Off (no automatic sensor cleaning will take
place).
If some dust does collect on your sensor, you can often map it out of your images (mak-
ing it invisible) using software techniques with the Image Dust Off Ref Photo feature
in the Setup menu. Operation of this feature is described in Chapter 10.
Of course, even with the Nikon D7000’s automatic sensor cleaning/dust resistance fea-
tures, you may still be required to manually clean your sensor from time to time. This
section explains the phenomenon and provides some tips on minimizing dust and elim-
inating it when it begins to affect your shots.
Chapter 14 ■ Nikon D7000: Troubleshooting and Prevention 477