So now that I have a 1ds Mark 2 with a full frame chip I have run into the bane of full chip cameras. Yes, those murky blobs of dust and crud have been appearing everywhere in my shots. Who would think changing lenses kneeling on the floor of a crowded bar would introduce dust to a camera? I mean, come on people! So off to the internets I went in search of solutions and I figured I'd post what I found.
I started off hearing about a magical Sensor Brush which sounded ideal for my working methods. It's simple, relatively harmless and expensive as all hell. $130 bucks for a brush? Something is not right there. More Googling turned up this site, "The Pixel Sweeper, A cheap alternative to the Sensor Brush", which I think exposes this fraud for all it is. I can't argue with his points, hell I was a painting minor in Art School so I know a bit about brushes and it all added up to me. Off to the local art store I went and bought a Winsor and Newton #10 flat, followed all his instruction and went to town.
Well, it worked pretty good getting rid of all the small bits, but the bigger ones remained. I ran into a few problem though. First off is that you have to wash the hell out of the thing if it is ever touched and the first thing everyone does when they see a brush sitting somewhere is touch it. I have no idea why. I would have it on a shelf, someone would be talking and pick it up and brush it with their fingers, much to my horror, ALL THE TIME. At some point this until now undocumented human need to touch brushes got the best of me and someone touched it without me knowing. I went in to clean the sensor one day and left a very interesting grease swipe on the middle of my chip. It looked as is two pieces of cling wrap were stuck together on top of my image. After some swearing and yet more washing of the brush I went back to the internets for another solution.
This time I came upon something called The Copper Hill Method.
*Cue the dramatic music*
The Copper Hill Method is the open heart surgery method of dealing with dust. Invasive, needing sterile gear and horrifying. The basic breakdown of this method is that you put a napkin on a freakin' spatula and wipe down the chip squeegee style. On a horror scale of 1 to 10 this comes in at about 10,000. Courtney Love on a drug bender knocking on your door at 2am and your wife answering horrifying.
Me: "You want me to drag a freakin' spatula across the main component of a 8k camera? Which if I scratch I have effectively created one hell of a expensive paper weight?"
Copper Hill: "What are you, chicken?"
But on the site there are hundreds of testimonials saying it's really great. And I mean hundreds. So I read on and the price was right. See, this is where the Sensor Brush scammers screwed up. If they would have priced their product reasonably I would have bought it right off the bat. But they went for money and flim flam pseudo science. The Copper Hill Product was $30.00, a very easy amount of money to part with.
I also now see that since I bought mine they now sell a kit with some brushes included for about $50. Damn it, I hate it when that happens. Anyway, I digress.
Three days later my kit arrived and I set up everything, reread the how to's, reread them again, had a shot of Jameson's, read it all again... you get the idea. It really is quite a scary prospect the first time. I took the site's advice and practiced on a UV filter about 20-30 times before I felt comfortable enough to do it on the camera. The camera though is a beast unto itself. The opening of the camera makes it a lot like playing very expensive game of Operation. The chip is set deep and the paint in there is a somewhat rough matt black that causes the swab to get stuck to the edges. Needless to say, my first attempt did not go very smoothly. I had a couple jumps and skips in my movement because of the snags on the paint. Feeling like I was turning in a failing test, I put a lens on and went into the back yard for a test shot. The best way to test the sensor for dust is to set the aperture to f22 and shoot a empty sky. I did that and loaded the image onto the computer and opened up the RAW file.
Something looked wrong on the bottom of the frame. A feeling of dear akin to a H.P Lovcraft story fell over me. It looked like I had a series a parallel black lines running at a angle across the bottom! I scratched my camera's chip! I'm an idiot! 8k gone! AHHHHH!!!!!!
I grabbed another shot of whisky in panic mode, finished off an entire cigarette in one drag and went into %100.
Telephone wires.
Yes, I shot telephone wires and they almost gave me a heart attack.
So, after calming down I went back in and noticed there was no dust anywhere. Not a speck. And no grease smear left behind from the brush either. I am very glad to say that each time you get in there with the swab it gets easier. My last time I had a very persistent speck in a corner and I kinda scrubbed that area a bit with a good amount of pressure to get rid of it to no harmful effects. The Copper Hill Site compares it to erasing with a pencil and I'd have to say I only had to go that hard that one time.
So, the short of this is that the $100+ sensor brush is a scam praying on the fears and uncertainties of new digi photographers (and who is not a new digi photographer?). The sensor brush "idea" works, but if anyone has touched it and contaminated it with finger grease you will spend hours retouching out smears going across your images instead of minutes on dust specks. Not a chance I would ever take on a shoot. EVER. It turns out that the best way to clean your chip is also the most horrifying. The Copper Hill Method wins hands down.
If you wish to avoid a trip to the emergency room I highly advise you look out for telephone wires when testing your cleaning methods as well.
"I think the demise of film has as much to do with the stupidity of film manufacturers in not moving their product forward as it does with the “advantages” of digital over film. Most films stink in performance. And I do not mean to imply that it’s an issue of grain or film speed. While we have a better choice with monochrome films, color negative film and chromes are just terrible products for a digital age — reason enough to go digital. Color negatives are “thin” (low gamma) and designed for optical enlargement and separation. They were never designed from the ground up to be a digitally scanned product, with no intention of printing to paper."
Some interesting points here as well. He comes from being a fine art shooter , not commercial and admits that, "If I were a product, fashion, news, wedding, or sports photographer, what choice would I have but to produce instant results? None. It’s a demanding world. But for the rest of us, we do have the luxury of time and the potential grace of a simpler life — if we choose to embrace it.". But he makes some good points about the technical distractions.
I would argue that these distractions are based on not having a smooth workflow though. When I shoot in clubs I have very few distractions to no from my gear and it is a lot easier to swap a CF Card then reload a roll of film in a crowded dark bar. But I have been honing my location gear for years and don't really do the "wandering landscape art" hikes anymore. Carrying the 1ds on a long hike is, well, err... good exercise?
"Although he is the guy who advertised it, sold it, packed it up, and shipped it, Joey Terrill still doesn't quite believe he dumped all his Hasselblad gear.
"I never dreamed in a million years that a Hasselblad camera might one day be a novelty," he said late last year. "I think that people who shot that camera for a number of years are, very much like me, having trouble swallowing it. It hurt."
It's not that Terrill is surprised that he's shooting his commercial and editorial assignments with digital now. He knew that would happen. What really surprises him is the camera he's using–a Canon EOS-1Ds rather than the Phase One P25 digital back for his Hasselblad that he was one day away from buying. How Terrill ended up with the Canon is the story of how a sudden impulse can save a man US$22,000."
I have worked extensively with files from both cameras and I agree that I do not see a 22k difference in the files. Plus, the Phase one falls apart at high ASA's and longer exposures are impossible. A photographer of mine said it best when he said it looks like glitter was thrown in the air. I feel for Medium format shooters though. The waist level finder seems to end up dominating their style and they have a hard time changing to a DSLR. I shot with a Hasselblad and a Seagull for a number of years in the 90's and I loved it. But when I got my first Coolpix the film in the freezer slowly starting migrating to the back.