Our first meeting of the New Year kicked off with an entertaining and instructive talk by Peter Brogden about why and how to clean DSLR camera sensors.  He started by showing us a house of horrors of poor or non-existent care of cameras and lenses, a sort of Darwin Awards for photographic equipment maintenance.

Cameras are not hermetically sealed boxes and dust will get inside. If you are using a zoom lens each time you zoom in and out you are forcing air, and therefore dust, into the camera. Each time you change a lens then dust can enter the camera. That dust will settle on, not necessarily the sensor, but on the low pass filter that sits in front of the sensor. .
Peter ran through the sequence of cleaning, starting with how to discover if there is dust on the sensor by firstly taking a photo of a blue sky or a piece of paper using a small aperture, say f22. Then in your photo editing software bring down the whites and blacks and the dust will appear as blotches in the image. He made a clear distinction between dust and contamination which can be either water spots or greasy spots.

Firstly the dust should be removed which is a dry cleaning process. Make sure your batteries are fully charged then remove the lens and lock up your mirror to reveal the sensor.  With mirrorless cameras the sensor is usually visible once the lens is removed. To remove dust from the sensor use a ‘blower’ for this. Never use canned and compressed air.  Once the blower stage is completed use a silicone pad and dab it on the sensor four times, once in each corner.

If there is contamination by water or grease, the next stage is a wet clean using swabs and cleaning solution. Swabs are available in different sizes depending on the size of the sensor. After applying a few drops of cleaning solution on the end of the swab, insert it into the camera, start one side of the sensor, swipe across the sensor to the other end, reverse the swab and swipe back to the start.

After a short break, Bob Philpott shared details of his experiences using trail cameras and CCTV to track wildlife. He started off with an inexpensive trail camera to develop his familiarity and experimented with different set ups before moving to more advanced equipment to capture photos and/or video. Video is his preference as it gives an insight into the behaviour of the subject being captured which is more informative than a still image. Some methods to reduce infra-red flare on night images were covered along with ways to secure the camera when installed in a public location. A good deal of time and patience is needed to capture images and once an animal’s behaviour is understood, this increases the likelihood of obtaining pleasing results. His footage included mainly deer, foxes, hedgehogs and an active badger sett.  A specially constructed box with entry and exit points and a camera secured inside had successfully achieved footage of smaller wildlife including field mice, a shrew and a rat exploring the surroundings.

Bob is a keen environmentalist and a member of the RWB Environmental Trust. A key objective of his work is to record wildlife activity and upload this into a national database. This enables not only the general well being of the local environment to be assessed but also provides a means to protect habitats to enable the wildlife to thrive.