How To: Clean Your Sensor

I want to start this post off with a disclaimer... this is a learned technique over many years and it has always worked for me. That being said, it may not always work the same and to manage expectations as your sensor may be super dirty that it can only be cleaned manually.

For the last 20 years I have been manually cleaning my own sensor. I bought wand wipes early into my photography career and have felt confident enough to manually wipe any debris off the sensor when needed. I used to do this maybe once a year, sometimes 2 years. It was very infrequent. So infrequent that I actually still have wands from that original 20 pack of wands I bought all those years ago.

It has been well over 7 years now since I have manually cleaned my sensor and I wanted to share with you how I keep my sensor clean despite shooting 200+ days a year and changing lenses fairly often.

I use my internal auto sensor cleaning mode within the camera.

I know I may get some push back from many people saying it doesn't work but hear me out. What works best for me is about every 6 months or so, or after I've been shooting in a place with a lot of dust, I do this "clean now" about 10-15 times back to back. This is the important part. It needs to be back to back. The sensor is shaking to get the debris off, it may loosen it but not remove it on the first 2-5 "cleanings" but with enough shaking it will have the time needed to loosen everything and it will all shake off nicely.

Since I've been doing this, I haven't had to edit out any dust spots in my photos. Whenever I try to edit images from before I started doing this, I'm always shocked at how much dust used to be on my sensor.

This was tested a couple years ago while running a private workshop. We had discovered that there was a large hair on my client's sensor that was showing up in the sky in their photos. It was something that could be fairly easily removed in the final photos but we had more locations to visit that morning so instead of having to remove it multiple times in post, why not try and fix it in the field.

So we did my "trick" of cleaning it 10-15 times and it took I think 12 times but it was gone and for the rest of our session together we didn't have to worry about this hair getting in the way of our compositions.

I hope this was helpful to those who need it and for those who live far away from places that can manually clean your sensor.

-Dani