Oh my goodness, there are few things that irritate me more than realizing that I have huge tracts of sensor dust to deal with when I get back from a shoot. The less time I have to spend tweaking my images the happier I am. Granted this is very easy now to deal with in lightroom or photoshop but I’d rather not have to deal with the problem at all. I’ve taken to making shots of clear sky at the end of a shoot in the vain hope that I’ll one day figure out how to automate the removal based on the imperfections on an otherwise clean background. If I ever figure that trick out I’ll share it here. Until then I’m going to develop a more rigorous sensor cleaning routing. I have no excuses really. I have sensor cleaning products from visible dust, including the sensor loupe, arctic butterfly and sensor swabs to name but a few of the tools of the trade. I question the utility of the arctic butterfly – I’ve never had this do anything other than make the problem worse. The sensor swabs however are great and highly recommended. Cleaning your sensor is not very difficult but it is a bit nerve wracking the first few times. Visible dust have a number of videos that explain the process nicely. I would also recommend taking a look at Moose Peterson’s website for his gear cleaning videos. This is a comprehensive set of demos covering everything from cleaning lenses to sensors.