It certainly needed a clean

It certainly needed a clean

I have owned my Nikon D7000 since 2011 just before my son was born. It has options in the menu to clean the sensor by vibration which I think is set to initiate every time the camera is turned on. I also own a rocket blower which I use occasionally to blow air onto the sensor while the camera is held facing downwards which should hopefully clear at least some of the dust.

I have owned my Nikon D70 since 2004 and my Nikon D200 since 2008 and have occasionally used the blower on both of these cameras also but until recently none of my cameras have had a physical sensor clean using a wet or dry swab or any other cleaning method.

The above photo was taken recently on my D7000 at f22 and pointing the camera at the sky. I used levels in photoshop to enhance the blemishes even more. I had been aware for some time now of some build up of dust on the sensor but I also think the camera may have been prone to oil spots on the sensor which has affected some cameras and the D7000 does come up during a Google search on this. As I often use the camera to take photos for the weekly macro challenge I have been using apertures of f16 and smaller. Sometimes on certain photos this problem doesn't seem so bad but I have been using the healing brush to get rid of any blemishes that show up on my photos.

So I recently ordered some wet and dry swabs and these arrived a few days ago. Saturday night after charging the battery I used a wet swab to clean the sensor and then followed this with a dry one. I actually deliberately ignored the conventional advice and went back and forth several times with the wet swab as I thought any oil spots may take more than one pass and then made a couple of passes with the dry one. I wouldn't advise this but do think my sensor needed it.

The upshot of this is I now have a D7000 with a much cleaner sensor than it has had for a long time and is a vast improvement on how clean it was before. I expect that over five years any excess oil that may have been on the mirror box will probably have been dispersed and will probably not affect the sensor anymore. The dust problem will always be there and I now have several wet and dry swabs to use if I think the camera would benefit from their use.