Times when you really should check your sensor!

[Keith]

Just shot two hundred and fifty images with my M8 ... all outdoors in bright light and lots of sky in the top half to two thirds of many of the pics ... smack in the middle about a quarter of the way down each and every frame is a lovely dark dot courtesy of a very large speck of dust on the sensor ...

... doh! 😱

 

[sevres_babylone]

I know the feeling. From my R-D1. At home, I'm usually shooting bands from F1.4 to F2.8, so it came as a big surprise to me when I got back from a trip to Buenos Aires, where I was in F8 land, with dark blotches in the blue skies. Clone tool or healing tool mostly worked fine, but were too tedious when I had to deal with electrical wires. Even after that, I didn't get around to finally cleaning my sensor until 4 a.m. before a recent trip.

And JSU, I know the film experience too. A cat hair acts as a watermark on my XA Oaxaca shots 🙂

 

[popeye]

I'd like it if the sensor was the issue on my DSLR, but nooooooooo it's in the lens. Big giant flake of paint or whatnot.

 

[gavinlg]

One area the olympus DSLRs are amazing is their supersonic dust shaker thing, which actually works incredibly well.

My 5d is a dust magnet.

 

[menos]

Just shot two hundred and fifty images with my M8 ... all outdoors in bright light and lots of sky in the top half to two thirds of many of the pics ... smack in the middle about a quarter of the way down each and every frame is a lovely dark dot courtesy of a very large speck of dust on the sensor ...

... doh! 😱

If you use Lightroom, you might be interested in my short writeup, I posted here:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1038&message=34597965

I went through some processing tonight and was annoyed, I had about 20 dust spots on the sensor.
bright sunny day, used mostly f5.6 and smaller apertures.

I describe, how to create a healing brush layer in Lightroom, that can be applied with the positions and sizes of all dust bunnies on an infinite number of files at once - eases the torture a lot!

 

[jaapv]

Easily batch removed in Potoshop CS or C1 5.0 pro. But irritating...