Focus Screen Part 2

In my last blog post I talked about the Focus Screen on your camera and what it does. This week I am writing part two of this article on how to replace or clean your Focus Screen properly so that you can always have a clear viewfinder to look through.

To remove your Focus Screen for cleaning or replacement, you need a Focus Screen tool. This is a special, plastic, tweezer-like tool that can grab the Focus Screen by it’s little tab and remove it safely. If you take off your lens and lay the camera on it’s back, look at the top of the lens opening and you will see a small metal tab. Flip that down carefully with your finger or tweezers and that releases the frame, and there the Focus Screen is.

Focus Screen release tab is circled in white.

Once you have flipped the Focus Screen frame switch, the frame drops down on it’s own and you can see the Focus Screen. Using the Focus Screen tool, grab the Focus Screen by the tab and gently lift it out of the camera.

New Focus Screen and grabber tool in the plastic box

 To clean the Focus Screen, Canon recommends you use a Rocket Blower first to see if you can blow any of the particles off the Focus Screen. You can then re-insert it with the tool, close the frame and look through your viewfinder to see if you were successful. If not, remove the Focus Screen again and you can try cleaning it with soap and water.

Prepare some warm water in a small dish or cup, you can use Distilled water but it’s not required. Add a small amount of dish soap like Dawn or whatever you have in your kitchen. Put the Focus Screen in the solution and let it soak for a bit, remove it from the solution and gently brush it with a horsehair brush, like a small paint brush, new of course, that people use to paint models.

Next, use your Rocket Blower and blow the Focus Screen dry, never use your breath. You can use compressed air, but make sure you don’t freeze the Focus Screen by blowing it too closely with the compressed air. Once you feel it’s clean, and dry, put it back into the frame and snap the frame back into place. Never touch the Focus Screen with your fingers, other than by the side edges as the oils in your skin will make a mess of the Focus Screen and that oil is pretty much impossible to get off again according to Canon.

Rocket Blower for cleaning sensor and Focus Screen

Check your viewfinder again, if it’s clear, you are good to go! I sometimes try to clean my Focus Screens, but I have bought used cameras and had the Focus Screen just so incredibly dirty that I just replaced it. You can buy new Focus Screens from Canon, Nikon (if you are a Nikon shooter), B&H, Adorama, or Amazon. When you order a new one they come in a nice plastic tray assembly with a snap close lid and the tool comes with it. After I remove my old one and swap it out, I put the old one in the tray and store it in a drawer just in case I need an emergency spare.

Now, if you don’t have the stomach to clean the Focus Screen, you can easily just replace it yourself or take your camera to a camera shop to do it for you. I will warn you that depending on where you live, it can cost you upwards of $200 to have it changed. If you are a CPS member, Canon will clean it for free along with your sensor once a year, but you have to ship it to them and be without your camera for a few days.



Comments/Questions

Removing "Noise" with Lightroom

One of the biggest advantages of digital cameras or DSLR’s over their film counterparts is the ability to switch ISO settings on the fly. ISO is the amount of light that you let into the camera’s sensor and in the days of film cameras this was accomplished with film speed, sometimes called ASA instead of ISO.

So if you wanted to shoot outdoors, you would load a roll of ISO or ASA 100 or 200 and be good to go, but if you then moved into a dimly lit building and wanted to shoot, you needed either a flash on that camera or you needed to have used up that roll of 100 or 200 film and switch to 400 or 800 to shoot well in those conditions.

With the advent of the digital camera, you can shoot outdoors at ISO 100, and then step indoors and with the flip of a switch or wheel, shoot at ISO 800 or even higher like 6400 or maybe even 12,800. The problem is as your ISO gets higher, you get digital “noise” in your photos. Noise is the little dots, speckles or grain look in your image that I am sure most everyone has seen at one time or another.

See the grains of noise in this image. I shot indoors at ISO 2000

 Some cameras are better at others at handling high ISO, low noise, but at some point even the best of these cameras will end up with noise in your images and it can make the image ugly and unusable. Luckily, Lightroom can help mitigate this for you and make this image useable again.

When you load your images in Lightroom and come across an image that has noise, this is how you can clean it up in the Lightroom Develop Module. The two big noise removal sliders are under the Detail section and called Luminance and Color.

After some Luminance and Color noise reduction notice the image is much cleaner

Here is what each does. Luminance: This kind of noise affects the brightness, but not the color, of individual pixels. If you had a picture of a dark grey piece of paper with a great deal of luminance noise it would appear similar to old-school television static with lots of light and dark fuzz.

Color or sometimes called Chroma noise: This shows up as oddly-colored pixels, scattered throughout an image, almost like someone has tossed a handful of red, blue, and green grains of sand at it. Lightroom calls this “Color” noise, but it’s just another term for Chroma noise.
Now, although you can remove considerable noise with Lightroom, you want to make sure you are careful not to use too much noise reduction as it can make the images look fake and give everything a plastic look. A lot of pros will counter some of the effects of the noise reduction by using some sharpening as well for the best results.

A side by side of the before on the left and after on the right.

 As you can see in my side by side before and after shot, the Lightroom noise reduction did help clean up this image a lot.

Comments/Questions

Keeping Your DSLR Sensor Clean

    One of the biggest problems we face as photographers is keeping that DSLR sensor clean when shooting, especially when shooting outdoors. Your sensor is the primary component inside your camera for capturing and preserving those moments to the memory card and needs to always be in the best possible condition and clean to take great photos. Dirt, dust, oils and general grime on the sensor will show up on your images and make them look badly such as the example below from The Digital picture.com

    Those two spots you see are from sensor dust and they are imbedded in your image. Now you can remove them using Photoshop, Lightroom and some other editing programs, but why not prevent them all together? I am going to give you some tips for keeping the dust and dirt out of your sensor.

Never touch the inside of your DSLR, especially with you fingers. The internal workings behind your lens are not meant for your fingers so, keep them out!
Only change your lens in a semi controlled environment. What I mean by this is don’t change your lenses outdoors in 35mph winds as you are just asking for sensor dirt.
Keep your camera pointed down when changing lenses. I am not sure why so many people don’t get this one. Holding the camera with the opening facing forward or up just invites the dirt in, holding it down makes it harder for it to get in.
Never change the lens with the camera powered on. Will it ruin your camera to do so, no but it will keep a static charge inside the shutter area and allow dust to be drawn to your sensor like a magnet.
   
    I have found, one of the easiest ways to keep my sensor clean is just limit how often I change lenses. I never change them outdoors if I can help it. I carry 2-3 bodies when I am shooting outdoors and I equip one body with a wide angle lens for landscapes, the second one will have a portrait lens of some sort for capturing people and my third will have a nice telephoto zoom for anything else I might need to shoot. Now I know you are thinking “I’m not rich enough to afford 2-3 camera bodies.” You’d be surprised the deals you can find at local pawn shops or yard sales, often people don’t realize what they have and will sell the bodies cheap. Also, who says you need the latest, most expensive body out there. Instead of buying one $1,000-$3,000 body, use that money to buy 2-3 bodies that are cheaper because they are the older model, like getting a Canon 1Ds full frame for $500 that was made in 2004 but still shoots great, instead of the Canon 1Dx which runs $7,000. Too many people don’t seem to realize that it is not the camera that takes the great images, it’s the person behind it.
    Until next Sunday, this is the Sunday Ambassador saying get out there and make some great images!

Comments/Questions

So Fresh and So Clean!

Keeping your DSLR clean. Source: MyDigitalCamera.us.

The investments we make in our gear are vast. We spend time researching to choose just the right camera and lenses, money to make the purchases, and more time to learn our gear inside and out. If you're not sure of the best ways to maintain and clean your valuable items, read on for some easy methods you can incorporate into your routine.

Lenses - Glass

A microfiber cloth (or disposable lens cleaning cloths) and optical cleaner are must-haves for your camera bag. I also keep a lens pen in mine, which has two ends: one to brush away dust, and one with a flat surface to buff out smudges. An air blower is a big more bulky, so I just keep one at home for between-shoot cleanings.

Lenses and Camera Bodies - Focus Rings

The focus connection points on your lenses and camera body need attention. You can give them a cosmetic cleaning with a microfiber cloth, but for a deeper clean you can dampen a cotton swab with Purosol and gently clean out any grit.

Camera Sensor

Far and away the most intimidating part of the camera to clean, many people choose to send their cameras out for sensor cleaning. This can be very costly, though, and it's relatively easy to do it yourself. The first step is to use your camera's self-cleaning option, but that doesn't always do the trick. For tougher dust specks, I like to use the sensor gel stick by Photography Life. I find it so much better and less likely to do damage than the cleaning kits that require swabbing across the sensor. Again, though, if the idea of exposing your sensor scares you, take your camera to the shop.

When you're not shooting, make sure your gear is stored sealed in bags or cases to avoid dust getting into crevices. Taking regular measures to maintain your gear will make it last much longer. If you have other tips on maintaining and cleaning your camera and lenses, leave a comment!

-Friday Ambassador

Work Cited:

"How to Clean DSLR Camera Sensor." My Digital Camera. MyDigitalCamera.us, 14 July 2011. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.

"Optical Lens Cleaner." Purosol. Purosol, 2011. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.

Wide-Angle Wednesday: Is that spot on the lens or sensor?

Corina Scoggins "Good Morning Saturday" 22 Feb 2014

Good Morning Fellow Photography Classmates and Faculty!

I’m excited to be back in a photography course this term and as expected I have been shooting my little heart out. I recently purchased the Canon 100mm Macro USM lens and I have been trying to achieve the awesome macro shots we have all come to see in macro photography. Below is a mystery rainbow that appeared on my living room ceiling yesterday morning. I'm still wondering what caused the prism to appear, but I used the macro lens to capture the image. It must be noted that my home faces North and South, and the light coming into my home was defused by window blinds. Maybe it was a fore shadow to brighten my day because as you read on, you will see that my day didn't pan out so well.  

Corina Scoggins "Magic House Rainbow" 25 Feb 2014

Yesterday while out shooting for the upcoming assignment I had a moment in which shut down the use of my camera. I had been shooting for three hours when I started to notice spots in the images. I do a lot of outside shooting and from moment to moment I tend to switch out lenses constantly. My biggest worry has always been dust getting on the sensor or on the lens. 

I recently read a thread in a local photography group about this very issue. The recommendation was to change the lens and take a shot. If the spots were gone, then the spots are coming from the previous lens. If the spots were still in the image, then chances are something is on the sensor. Luck was not on my side; the spots continued to appear on the images. This forced me to have to wrap everything up, and head for home.

Corina Scoggins "Hawk at Happy Hollow" 25 Feb 2014

Knowing our little town doesn’t have anyone who specializes in cameras, I knew I would have to solve the issue myself.  With the Internet at my fingertips, I started the search for recommendations. If the Internet wasn’t available, the best recommendation would be to pull out the book, but I simply searched Canon sensor cleaning to find the help page on Canon.com. 

Majority of DSLR cameras have a built in sensor cleaning. I knew my camera had built in sensor cleaning and if I simply would have turned off the camera; the camera would have commenced to clean the sensor. Of course during the moment, my concern was getting home to solve the issue. Little did I know the issue was solved upon turning off the camera. With the looming deadline for the assignment, my mind was not focused. Not having a backup camera, my fear was the assignment would not be complete with the images shot on Sunday and Monday. So I continued to read on to figure out how to fix a problem that had self-fixed.

Corina Scoggins "MP Memorial Grove" 25 Feb 2014

If the initial sensor cleaning had not corrected the issue, Canon recommends two methods. The first recommendation was to use the rubber air blower technique. The second recommendation would be to take the camera to a Canon Service Center. I followed the instructions for the first recommendation and proceeded to use the rubber air blower bulb I had purchased many moons ago and glad I had it available. Other options are talked about on the help page but are NOT recommended by Canon, yet they do write about these options. 

Thankfully the issue was resolved and I will be bearing the frigid temperatures to finish shooting for the assignment due. I’m glad the camera didn’t have to be sent to Canon, but the Girl Scout in me has me thinking if I should purchase a backup camera. Nothing new, something used but most importantly a camera that could be used just in case. Additionally, I really need to better plan for desired shots that will limit the changing out of lenses. Below I have included the links to both the Canon and Nikon self help in regards to sensor cleaning. Hopefully you will never have this issue, but just in case, it’s best to “BE PREPARED”.

Canon Users

Nikon Users

Alright, why didn't I share the images with the spots? I could simply state that I had NO images with spots! Yes it's true, I freaked out about something that didn't exist. Here is the portion of the story in which I left out above. Everything written is exactly what occurred, and the spots I seen had nothing to do with my camera sensor or lens. The spots I was seeing all of a sudden was on the viewfinder! Now I do have to assume that the spots appeared while I had walked away to my vehicle and left the camera on the tripod. I say this because I had not noticed these spots until I walked back to the camera and started to shoot landscape. After everything was said and done, my mood was a little tempered for making such a rookie mistake. Today I can admit that it's a comical moment, and why not share with everyone on PSPN. Punishment for seeing spots and jumping to conclusion...temperatures in the teens. 

Well I hope today's blog will be a guidance in how to deal with spots? Even if spots had appeared in the images, chances are you wouldn't noticed them until you imported the images. If your seeing spots, clean the viewfinder first. Import the images to confirm if the spots are truly an issue on the images. Then proceed with the instructions to fully resolve any issues. 

Question of the Day

Have you ever jumped to conclusions while out on a shoot?

Share your comments, suggestions, and stories below

You're Wacky Wednesday Student Ambassador

Corina