How to: Clean your Camera and Lenses

Introduction

Filthy Exc 5+ Nikon AF-S 35mm 1.4G

This is another article where the idea came from one of our Discord member, that asked what I do to keep my cameras and lenses clean. I don’t do a lot, but what I do is described in this article.

Disclaimer

Obviously when doing anything with your cameras and lenses as described here, you do that at your own risk. We cannot be hold accountable for any damage that may be caused. Always use some common sense and follow the cleaning products’ instructions to minimize the potential of anything going sideways.

Camera

Sensor

sensor dust

Sensor dust shows up as small dark circles (sometimes also lines, if a hair is on your sensor) in your pictures. In Lightroom there is also a function to highlight it, which helps to remove these specs with local cloning:

dust highlight function in Lightroom

Obviously this is still a tedious task, so a small Blower (affiliate link) is an accessory that can always be found in my camera bag. It helps to get rid of bigger dust particles and other junk.

If the Blower is not strong enough – meaning after using it you still encounter those dust artefacts – you may need to use a wet Swab. These Swabs come in sizes according the the sensor format and I definitely recommend to buy the right ones,as it will make your life easier. Personally I am using these Swabs from VSCO (affiliate link). I also recommend to follow the instructions, especially how much of the cleaning fluid to use.

Exterior

For the exterior I am using car cleaner that can be applied with a micro fibre cloth and Q-Tips for the harder to reach corners.

My car cleaner of choice is Armor All which you can get on amazon.de (affiliate link). I am sure in any country you can find something similar.

Lens

Glass Surfaces

For glass surfaces what I am using are Lenspens (affiliate link). You can find one of those in every one of my camera bags. Sadly they vary in quality and it is not always easy to tell from the product description if you will end up with a good or bad one. They also deteriorate over time, so after some heavy use it may make sense to replace them.

Rubber Rings

Over time the rubber rings on lenses may show whitening or even small debris in the small gaps. Also here I am using car cleaner than can be applied with a micro fiber cloth and Q-Tips for those small gaps. After doing that a lens will look like new, as can be seen from this before/after comparison:

Sigma 50mm 1.4 EX

Sigma 150mm 2.8 EX DG HSM Macro

Nikon AF-S 35mm 1.4G

Nikon AF-S 85mm 1.4G

Conclusion

I hope some of these tips described here will be helpful to keep your gear in a good condition and maybe even to avoid spending money on expensive third party sensor cleaning.

Further Reading

• All Lens Reviews
• Lens aberrations explained
• Best fullframe lenses from China
• Review: Nikon 200mm 2.0 IF ED
• Reviewing Lenses isn’t really worth it

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