- What's up everybody?
Peter McKinnon here,
and today we're talking about how to clean your sensor.
How to do it at home.
What to do.
What not to do.
To keep that camera in good working order.
Let's go!
(upbeat slide guitar, synth, bass drum)
Ahhh.
I got this mug in Hawaii ages ago.
All right.
What's going on?
How is everyone doing today?
We're talking about how to clean your sensor.
Now this wasn't a video that was on my radar
in the last couple of months.
It only really kind of came up when I was in Africa
because, like I mentioned in the last vlog,
it's super dusty there.
There was a lot of wind.
There was a lot of dirt flying around.
I'm pretty good with keeping my gear clean.
Now, I've got a lot of pro equipment,
so it's all weather sealed.
So for the most part,
living here, I never have to really worry about it.
My cameras don't really get too dirty.
My lenses don't get too dirty.
But when I met up with Max in Kenya,
I was looking at his stuff,
and I was like, dude!
Your gear is filthy.
And I thought to myself,
"How does this guy not clean his equipment or what?"
One day outside,
got back to my room,
looked at my gear and was like,
"What is happening?"
Inevitable.
Sometimes you're just in environments,
you're in situations,
you're doing a shoot, whatever.
It might be a paid gig.
It might not be.
It might be just where you're exploring.
But you get back and your stuff is a mess,
so what do you do?
How do you clean it?
What do you use to clean it?
Do you have to send it away to clean it?
Can I do it at home?
What should I not be doing?
Those are some of the things I thought that might
be valuable to teach you guys in today's episode,
so I'm gonna go into some of them.
Now, full disclosure.
I only clean my sensor if I notice that there's some
obvious piece of dirt on it.
Like when you're shooting,
and you've got your camera and you're looking through it.
And you can see like a dark spot,
or even when you get back to editing
and you see a dark spot on your photos,
and you're like, "What the heck is that?"
And you gotta clone stamp it.
That means there's dirt on your sensor,
and that is when you need to clean it.
I don't just get home from like a regular shoot,
hanging out with my buddies and be like,
"Hmmm. All Right.
"Gonna put this down.
"I'm gonna go ahead and clean."
You're kinda just asking for it.
You wanna open that sensor up as little as possible.
So only clean it if you really need to clean it.
Now, second thing I wanna mention is
only do this if you're confident in your own
abilities to do so.
I am not responsible for anybody opening up their sensor
and like spitting on it or carving your name in it,
or like melting a candle over it.
Don't do any of those things.
If you ruin your sensor,
it's not on me,
so good luck with it.
It's a finicky situation, right?
When it comes to cameras,
cleaning the sensor,
opening up that sensor and exposing it
and actually touching the surface with anything
is like, is like diffusing a bomb.
It's one of the most sensitive, vulnerable spots
of a camera.
So you don't want to just open it up
and go microwave some pizza and watch
some Netflix and come back and like,
"Oh! I forgot I left that open."
Like this is something you just wanna do quick,
get it done right, close that up,
and not have to do it, preferably,
for as long as possible.
Compressed air.
Lens cleaner.
Rocket blower.
Horrible name.
And we got a loop and a lens cloth.
Now, this is what I do not recommend to use.
Compressed air is not very good
because it comes out too strong.
So if you're trying to clean stuff off of a lens,
a lot of the time,
this can end up pushing dirt further into the camera.
It can push it into those crevices of the lens.
It can push it into areas, into the buttons.
Now if my camera's super dusty and I get home,
I might give it like a quick.
Something like that just to brush off all the dirt
or pollen or whatever's been on it from
wherever I've been shooting.
But I'm not gonna get like super up close
into the eye piece, into all these things
just because I don't wanna force anything
further into the camera that shouldn't and doesn't
need to be in there.
Do not turn it upside down and open up the sensor
and subzero freeze it because, well then.
You know.
Just an idiot.
Just don't do that.
So this is what I use instead.
These are rocket blowers.
I keep this in my bag everywhere I go.
Every time I open up the body to change the lens,
I turn the camera upside down so that anything
that I'm blowing in here is gonna fall out.
I don't wanna go this way.
I wanna just give it a quick
couple of squeezes like that.
The dirt falls out.
I put my lens on.
Now when I'm done shooting,
I take my lens off.
I give this a quick little once over.
I put the cap back on,
and I'm good.
You wanna keep this cap on as much as possible,
or a lens on as much as possible.
You wanna avoid any possible down time
where that camera is just sitting open
for extended periods of time.
That's just asking for it.
It would be like leaving your car
with all the doors open and the keys in the ignition.
And you just park it down in the city,
and you just go out for the day.
You wanna give your lens a quick clean when you get home.
Zeiss Lens Cleaner, this microfiber cloth.
It's super soft.
This was like three dollars.
So it's super cheap.
But just to show you an example of like
how dirty it was when I was shooting in Africa.
This was after one day.
I just got home.
I wiped the lens down.
Look at all the dirt that came off just one UV filter
from like a half day's shoot.
That's a lot of dirt coming off of a UV filter.
So you can imagine the whole lens was covered.
The body, the screen, everything.
Now I know we're getting into like cleaning a lens here,
but I mean we're here and I may as well before
I show you the sensor stuff.
I don't recommend just spraying down on the top.
First, I would just give a couple sprays
to the actual cloth, itself.
So I would just start with two,
and then I would wipe the top of the lens.
Furthering that, a couple squeezes of the rocket there.
Get all those extra fluffies off,
and then the cap goes straight back on.
That lens is clean.
That's all you need to do.
Don't use this.
You don't need to spray the sh out of it.
Just spray the rag.
Get it done
Movin' on.
All right, now it's time for the sensor.
So you can have it professionally cleaned.
You can send it to your camera manufacturer.
They'll do it, obviously, in the clean room flawlessly.
You'll get it back.
Mint.
There is the down time of having your camera gone.
You have to ship it to them.
Unless you live close.
You might be able to drop it off.
But then you just still gotta go pick it up,
or have it shipped back.
So there's a Canadian company called Visible Dust.
And they specialize in sensor cleaning
and camera cleaning and all that kind of thing.
And they got a product called the Arctic Butterfly.
And they're not paying me to say this for advertising
any of their stuff.
I don't actually even use the Arctic Butterfly.
I used to have one back when I worked at the camera shop
'cause they're really expensive.
They're like 350 dollars and at that point,
you may as well just send your camera
out to have it professionally cleaned.
They work pretty well.
I just never really liked it that much.
There's two different methods.
There's using that brush.
I prefer the swabs.
They sell these swabs and they're individually packaged,
so that they're perfectly clean and air tight.
And then you get this liquid with it,
which is called Vee Dust Plus, multi-ingredient formula
specifically made for DSLR sensors.
Made in Canada.
Hey.
So there's the sensor cleaning stuff right there.
That's all I need.
You toss this away.
You buy a pack of them.
You get like 12.
Like I said, I'm not cleaning my sensor every month,
every two months anyway,
so one pack of these swabs will last me quite a while
unless I was shooting somewhere like Africa
on a consistent basis.
The last thing that I use is what I really, really
like from them, and I've had these
as long as they've made them, is their loops.
It comes in a little case like this.
It's essentially a giant magnifying glass
with different LEDs.
You got red ones.
You got white ones.
And then you got nothing.
So this sits on top of the camera,
so you can look down onto the sensor
and see it massive
and you can actually see where the dust
and the dots and all the dirt is,
so you know where to swab,
or if you've missed anything.
So the red LEDs are something that their calling
dark adaptation, which means when you're
in a dark environment,
you're using those LEDs and your pupils
have adjusted to that environment.
You're able to see more detail and more spots
and potential dirt on the sensor using that red LED
with their dark adaptation technology.
The problem is there's dust and particles
and nonsense floating everywhere in your house.
You can't necessarily see it,
but you don't want your sensor open and exposed
to all of this stuff that's floating around,
so what do you do?
Go into your bathroom and run the shower
on as hot as it goes for like five minutes.
That's gonna get the room really, really hot.
Really, really steamy.
Really, really humid.
And that weighs down all the dust, all the dirt,
all the particles that would be floating around
in the air.
Turn off the shower.
Bring the camera in.
Do your sensor cleaning.
That's the best case scenario
of not getting any extra particles
or dust floating around,
trapping them in your camera by accident.
You've essentially created a clean room in your house
by weighing all that dirt down with the humidity
and the water and the steam
that's in the air from the shower.
All right, so the first thing you're gonna want to do
is turn the camera on.
A lot of these cameras,
the sensor is opened through the menu.
So I shoot Canon.
If you guys do as well,
it's under the wrench tab
and it's the third tab over.
Called Sensor Cleaning.
You're gonna click on that.
And you've got three options.
Now, you'll notice it has Auto Cleaning,
Clean Now, and Clean Manually.
Clean Now, you'll probably notice,
if you click that,
it kind of vibrates the sensor a little bit
to shake off some of the dirt.
You'll probably notice that also happens
sometimes when you turn the camera off.
At the end of the day,
it does a little sensor cleaning there
just to kind of keep everything as neat
and tidy as you can.
But what you wanna do is go back into that menu,
Sensor Clean and you're gonna go Clean Manually,
and what that does is it exposes the sensor,
and then it's go time.
So let's go ahead and do that.
Clean Manually.
It says, "Mirror will lock up.
"After manually cleaning sensor,
"turn the power off,"
which will automatically close that door.
So go over to OK,
and listen for this.
(click)
There it is.
The sensor is now open.
All right.
So that is your image sensor.
So what you're gonna want to do
is throw that loop on there.
It's gonna keep any dirt out.
We're gonna turn the light on,
and take a look inside.
So there is that loop looking inside.
That is red, which will show more dirt and specks.
Now, I'm gonna put one drop on the front,
and one drop on the back.
Sometimes I do two drops on the front,
two drops on the back,
but you know, to each his own.
So we take this off.
Try not to drop this.
Try not to drop the swab at this point
because it's perfectly clean,
and you don't wanna touch the sensor with anything
that's not clean.
It would be like washing a car and if you drop
the rag on the driveway and then pick the rag up
and continue wiping down the car.
Not the best idea.
So we're gonna go one drop here,
two drops because I feel like it.
Flip it over.
One drop.
And two drops.
Just to get like an even distribution of liquid.
So you're gonna put the swab all the way in
and just paint across.
Pretty much it.
Now you can do another pass to make sure
there's no streaks on there.
Once you're done,
you're gonna throw that loop back on.
You're gonna take a look at your handiwork,
make sure there's no streaking,
no more specks.
Now, once you're done,
just like the instructions said,
you wanna turn that camera off,
and that closes the sensor door,
flips the mirror back down
and you're good to go.
All right, guys.
So that's it for me today.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
I hope you learned something.
I hope you got something out of it.
If your camera's dirty,
if you need to clean the sensor,
if you're just looking for some general knowledge
on how to take care of your equipment better,
I hope this served you well.
Again, be careful.
Be cautious.
Take your time.
Don't speed through it.
But being able to clean your own sensor
and keep your own equipment
in its best working condition
is something that every photographer,
cinematographer should definitely know how to do.
So thanks so much for watching.
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Thank you so much for watching,
and
I'll see you guys on the next video.
Right here.
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