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Air Cleaning
Your first attempts at cleaning your sensor should always involve gentle blasts of air.
Many times, you’ll be able to dislodge dust spots, which will fall off the sensor and, with
luck, out of the mirror box. Attempt one of the other methods only when you’ve already
tried air cleaning and it didn’t remove all the dust.
Here are some tips for doing air cleaning:
■ Use a clean, powerful air bulb. Your best bet is bulb cleaners designed for the job,
like the Giottos Rocket. Smaller bulbs, like those air bulbs with a brush attached
sometimes sold for lens cleaning or weak nasal aspirators may not provide sufficient
air or a strong enough blast to do much good.
■ Hold the camera upside down. Then look up into the mirror box as you squirt
your air blasts, increasing the odds that gravity will help pull the expelled dust
downward, away from the sensor. You may have to use some imagination in posi-
tioning yourself. (See Figure 14.12, which illustrates how I clean my Nikon
D7000.)
■ Never use air canisters. The propellant inside these cans can permanently coat your
sensor if you tilt the can while spraying. It’s not worth taking a chance.
■ Avoid air compressors. Super-strong blasts of air are likely to force dust under the
sensor filter.
David Busch’s Nikon D7000 Guide to Digital SLR Photography484
Figure 14.12
Hold the cam-
era upside
down and blow
the dust off the
sensor.