I have a Canon Digital Rebel, and after traveling through the deserts of Egypt the sensor was dirty. In the following picture, notice the many dust spots near the top of the frame.
I found a great website that thoroughly explains how to clean a digital SLR camera, so I decided to try to clean the camera myself. I didn’t have much money to spend on my camera, so I decided to make the cleaning wand instead of buying one. The website shows how to make a cleaning wand from a Wendy’s plastic knife, and I found a plastic knife at my local grocery store that worked very well.
At my local camera store, I bought Pec*Pad lint-free wipes ($7.50 for 100 wipes) and Eclipse cleaning solution ($8.99 for 2 oz.). Both came with the highest recommendation by the website, and I was impressed with each of them.
The website had an ingenious method for inspecting the sensor for dust, and my camera was even dirtier than I originally thought it was. In the image below, each of the dots is dust.
I used a CO2-cartridge air blaster to blow out the large dust. I used the plastic knife, the cleaning wipe, and the cleaning solution to swab the dust off the sensor. It was relatively easy, and I removed a lot of dust during my first attempt.
I repeated the cleaning, and I managed to remove nearly all of the dust. Overall, I am very happy with how well this process worked, especially because I didn’t damage my camera!
