Moving Particles (Sensor Dust)

Here's the next in the endless story of sensor dust (and sensor dust removal). The Nikon D700 has, like most of the modern cameras, a built-in sensor cleaning feature (some ultrasonic vibration, or whatever). After painfully realizing that a full frame sensor (more than twice the size of a DX/APS-C sensor) of course attracts more dust (due to the charge), I configured the camera to automatically run the built-in sensor cleaning every time I turn it off or on.

With my outdoor activity, I seem to catch up more greasy/sticky dust than just dry fluff, or whatever. The problem with that is: the camera's built in sensor cleaning can not remove that. Instead, the dust moves on the surface of the sensor and is multiplied that way as this 1:1 crop clearly shows:


Moving dust (the contrast & clarity have been increased a lot to make the problem more visible)

Which would you rather do? Use the Spot Removal feature in post processing once for a single dust particle, or three times? I chose that one usage is enough, and turned off the camera's built in dust removal feature again. The fact that it is not really efficient anyway is underlined by this article which I found (the article is in German, but just scroll down and look at the examples.)

The other obstacle that I ran into concerns the "Arctic Butterfly" - that super-expensive brush which is supposed to get some charge when rotating it with the battery-powered motor in its handle. I somehow managed to get some grease onto the brush itself. Maybe from some inner part of the camera, whatever. Now when I use the brush, chances are that I add a nice trail of grease onto the sensor - almost invisible to the human eye on the sensor, but VERY visible in the photos (not just a spot - a line, a streak... duh!). Now I know why they started to sell an even more expensive version with exchangeable brushes. :P

The quest for a clean sensor continues...