sensor cleaning

After noticing dust specks on some shots over the past month, I finally decided to bite the bullet and clean my sensor. The dust spots were very noticeable in the blue of the sky in my landscape shots, and were most obvious in shots that were made with smaller apertures (I usually shoot my landscapes in the f/16-22 range). After doing a bit of research on the internet, I found that beginning to notice specks in these instances seems to be fairly normal once dust is on the sensor.

Note: The Canon EOS 40D has one of those fancy-pants automatic sensor cleaning units that operates when the camera is turned on & off, and is supposed to shake off the dust from the front of the sensor. This feature works as advertised, but sooner or later you will still have to expect to get in there and manually clean the sensor in some form or fashion.

Soooo… after noticing the undeniable evidence of dust-bunnies on my sensor, I had a couple of choices open to me. (1) I could ignore the dust and use the Canon software’s “dust delete” function to erase the specks in each shot. But the thought of leaving the dust on the sensor didn’t sit well with me. (2) I could send my camera to Canon and have them clean the sensor for me. But from reading some accounts on internet forums, this sounded like it’d be a bit of a hit-or-miss proposition… since some folks have got their cameras back with the same or even more dust specks on the sensor. (3) I could clean the sensor myself.

The thought of mucking about in my beloved 40D’s innards spawned a few moments of anxiousness, but this is actually the course of action I decided upon. I had been in there once before, shortly after purchasing the beast, to change the focusing screen and that had gone well… so surely I could handle this?

After doing some more research on the internet, I settled on wet cleaning the sensor using the “copper hill method.” This essentially consists of ordering a kit from Copper Hill Images which includes a SensorSwipe tool, PecPads non-abrasive wipes, & Eclipse (E2 for the Canon 40D) optic cleaning fluid. I also picked-up a Giotto’s Rocket Air Blower at Mike’s Camera in Boulder.

The sterling service from Copper Hill Images was noteworthy, and the directions that accompany the materials (there’s also an on-line tutorial) were clear and detailed.

So yesterday morning, with just a bit of fear & trepidation, I arrayed everything close to hand on our dining room table, positioned a desk-lamp at my elbow, and sat down to do this.

In the 40D’s menu there is a selection for manually cleaning the sensor (it locks the mirror up out of your way until the camera is turned off), and after finding this & activating it, I got down to business. And I’m still alive to tell the tale! More importantly, I don’t seem to have done any irreparable damage to the sensor and, in fact, seem to have slain the dastardly dust bunnies which had started breeding on my sensor.

Actually, it was very easy. I think I’ll need to do it a few more times to feel completely comfortable with it, but the process itself was simple. From mirror lock-up to replacing the body cap, maybe three minutes had passed. If that.

Thanks for reading about stuff I’ve photographed… or in this case, stuff I’ve cleaned. ~Rich

you just never know

When you take a photo, you just never know what kind of reaction you might get to it. For instance, take this picture of a rhinoceros hornbill. I spent waaaay too much time photographing the two hornbills at the Denver Zoo (I think my wife was ready to bodily move me along) simply because I was so fascinated by them. But since posting this photo on Flickr, zoos in Texas and Pennsylvania have asked for permission to use it.

I didn't set out thinking that if I photographed this bird, I'd have zoos across the country asking to use it... I just got some shots of the hornbills because I thought they looked cool & because I was enjoying a day at the zoo. The lesson I've taken away from this experience is that it's important to photograph what interests you, have fun while you're doing it, and not worry about what kind of response you might get to your photos. Some of my favorite photos haven't received many looks at all on Flickr, while photos I thought were just so-so have been raved over and got hundreds of hits. You just never know. So what's most important is to be present in the moment, have fun with the experience, and to hopefully maybe learn something new (technically) from each outing (what could I have done differently with the camera settings? could there have been a better way to compose the shot? would the light be better if I went back at a different time of day? etc...)


And just between you & me, this baby giraffe is actually my favorite photo from that day at the Denver Zoo:


Thanks for reading about stuff I've photographed. ~Rich

pawnee national grassland

date of activity: 1/11/09

If you ever want to know where the middle-of-nowhere is, then just visit the Pawnee National Grassland in Weld County, Colorado. Okay, the grasslands aren’t actually so terribly remote… it only took me a little over two hours to reach the Pawnee Buttes from our home in the Denver-area, BUT it sure felt like the back-end of nowhere. The buttes themselves are pretty amazing, rising up as they do 250 feet above the surrounding prairie. You can see them from miles away. The entire area has a wide-open, desolate beauty. And also a very lonely, isolated feel since I didn’t see another person, or even another car, once I left the paved road (CO 14) and started winding back the rough, gravel roads into the heart of the grasslands.

I returned from this excursion with two photos that I’ve wanted to get for quite a while.


For some time now, I’ve wanted to get a shot of a remote stretch of road, straight-as-an-arrow, disappearing off into the horizon. I thought I might be able to get a shot like this when I was out in Utah, but never found just the right stretch of road that matched the image in my mind’s eye. This past Sunday, however, when I was on CO 14, somewhere past the town of Ault, I found my perfect road. I was heading east, topping a rise, when I looked in my rearview mirror and realized the stretch of road I’d just travelled over might just possibly be what I’d been seeking for. So I found a place to turn around… and sure enough, there it was—my perfect stretch of road! I tried out a few different compositions… some with more road than sky, some with more sky than road. This is my favorite. I really like this shot. There are no telephone poles or road signs or anything else to distract the eye from the clean, straight lines of the road and horizon. I’m also glad that it was a bit overcast that day, since the haze off to the west (masking the Rocky Mountains) seems to powerfully imply journeying into the unknown. As always, I used Photoshop Elements 6 to process the RAW data (digital negative). After my usual editing workflow in Elements, I also ran it through the Poster Edges filter.


For even longer than I’ve wanted a ‘road shot,’ I’ve wanted a ‘fence shot.’ I’ve taken plenty of pictures of fences, but have never been able to get a shot I felt good about. On this particular day, though, it was all coming together for me because after I got my ‘road shot’ and made my way back to the Pawnee Buttes, I got my ‘fence shot’! I had hiked out to the cliffs that are just south-west of the buttes and got some shots, then was heading back to the car, just about to pass through the gate at this fence, when I looked around… and sure as I was standing there, I knew this was going to be my long-awaited ‘fence shot.’ I backed up a few steps, explored a few different angles, and finally decided on this spot. I set the tripod up without unfolding the legs (so it remained about knee-high), since this would give me the perspective I wanted. I used a large aperture (an f/stop of 4.5 did the trick) since I wanted the closest post to be in sharp focus and everything else off into the distance to be less so. Since I don’t have a wide-angle lens (yet) I use the photomerge tool in Elements a lot for landscape shots, and that’s what I did here. I stitched together two vertical shots (near/far). This is also an HDR image, so I shot multiple exposures which I ran through Photomatix. The last thing I did in Elements was convert it to black&white. I used the infrared setting and then played around with the contrast a bit until I was happy with the result.

Needless to say, finally getting both my ‘road shot’ & ‘fence shot’ made my weekend. I’d like to return to the Pawnee National Grassland this spring and get some shots of the buttes with wildflowers in the foreground, and there’s also another shot I’d like to try from a spot farther out to the north-west. So stay tuned!

Thanks for reading about stuff I’ve photographed. ~Rich

brainard lake hike

I decided to have a little middle-of-the-week adventure by heading up to Ward, CO yesterday morning and hiking back to Brainard Lake.

I had been back to the Brainard Lake/Indian Peaks area this past summer and been blown away by the scenery, so I filed away the thought in the back of my mind that I’d like to return sometime in the winter. I knew the road is closed at the winter-gate (about midway back to Brainard Lake) and you have to hike/ski/snowshoe the rest of the way in, but I figured this would just add to the adventure.

Down in the Denver/Boulder area (we live halfway between), we’ve had some pretty mild weather lately, but as I was winding my way up Boulder Canyon on CO 119 toward Nederland, signs of winter (snow) began appearing. By the time I swung onto CO 72 (The Peak-to-Peak Highway) and headed north toward Ward, drifting snow covered the road in places, so I had to proceed carefully. About this time, I started to notice how incredibly windy it was up there.

After arriving in the metropolis of Ward (population: 170), I made it up the access road to the winter-gate closure with no problem and parked the Saturn. As the first faint light of dawn was beginning to color the sky to the east, I got out of the car and bundled up & loaded up, thinking, “Man, it’s a bit windy up here!” So much so that I wondered if I wanted to battle such a monstrous head wind the entire way back to the lake. But, being a stubborn Swede (with a healthy dose of hard-headed Scots thrown in for good measure), I decided I’d start off and could always simply turn around & return to the car if conditions warranted it. (The main winter “trail” back to Brainard Lake from the closure gate is actually the road, so I knew I wouldn’t be in any danger… except from the cold & snow.)

As I started off, the trail/road was mostly snow covered, but blown clear in a few spots. In a few places, there were some healthy drifts on one side of the road or the other, but where this occurred, the other side was always still hike-able. About every five minutes or so, a particularly vicious gust of wind would come barreling down the road and stagger me (keep in mind I’m 6’2”, weigh a shade over 200 lbs, and also had on a 20 lb pack). It was quite a blustery day, as Winnie the Pooh would say.

About halfway into the hike, I thought pretty seriously about turning around. Mostly because I doubted, what with this brutal wind & blowing snow, that I’d be able to photograph anything at all even once I made it back to the lake. I also have Reynaud’s, which leaves me dangerously susceptible to frostbite in my hands & feet. Normally, the blood vessels in a person’s extremities will expand in bitter cold (increasing blood flow & therefore warmth), but with someone who has Reynaud’s, the blood vessels actually constrict in the cold. For example, my hands will turn blue even in an air-conditioned room, and I’d walk the dog in winter and if I didn’t take the time to put on several layers of socks, I’d come in & a few of my toes would be bone-white from lack of circulation.

But I decided to press on (life is an adventure, remember?!). As the light increased, it was actually very beautiful out, with the wintry landscape & especially the snow-draped pine trees, and ice crystals swirling through the air in the great gusts of wind.

Just before reaching the lake, there was about a hundred-yard stretch of the ‘trail’ where three-feet of snow covered the entire road. It didn’t look any better down in the trees, so I just started to slog through it, knowing I was almost to the lake. Then I came around a curve in the road and saw a five-foot drift across the road. Yikes. So then I did go down into the trees to get around the drift. After that, though, I was at the lake and the road had been blown clear by the winds.

The ferocious wind & blowing snow were pitiless once I left the shelter of the trees that line the road, so I quickly headed over to the bathrooms off the parking lot. I didn’t have to go, but by that time I just wanted to get out of the wind for a few minutes. Unfortunately, there were four-foot snowdrifts piled up against the bathroom doors, so I had to settle for huddling behind the leeward side of the small shelter. After about ten minutes of shivering there, the sun was actually coming up over the horizon and I could see that even in the midst of all that blowing snow a bit of alpenglow was going to paint the landscape with that lovely, otherworldly illumination which you have to see to believe. So I decided to head out into the open ground on the east shore of the lake and see what I could see. Well, once I got out there, the wind was battering me so hard I could barely stand upright, the blowing snow made it almost impossible to face west for more than a few seconds at a time, and the Indian Peaks were covered in clouds. Huh.

I managed to snap off two quick shots and that was that. Time to skedaddle.

Once I started back down the ‘trail’ and into the shelter of the trees that line the road, things were much better (relatively speaking). Plus, I had quite the nice tail wind pushing me along now! I retraced my steps all the way back to the car, and was none the worse for wear once I got the heater cranked up.

You know, standing (leaning into the wind) there on the frozen shore of Brainard Lake, in a hurricane of driven snow, shivering in the bitter cold, I thought, “Rich, you are such an idiot! You could still be in your warm bed right now! And you still have to go to work later! Think of how tired you’re going to be tonight!” But then I realized there was no place I’d rather be in that moment, and nothing else I’d rather be doing. Life is an adventure, and yesterday morning I had a little adventure hiking back to Brainard Lake. I wouldn’t have traded that experience for anything. (Okay, I have to admit, I was pretty tired last night at work, but life is for the living, and I’ll get enough sleep when I’m dead.)

Thanks for reading about stuff I’ve photographed. ~Rich

looking back at 2008

Here on New Year’s Day 2009, I decided I’d spend some time going through my Flickr photostream and take a (photographic) look back at this past year. Doing this was like scrolling back through a journal of all that I’d done in 2008. After that, I was going to use this blog post to write about some of my favorite (photographic) memories of the year that has just ended, but I actually found it impossible to single out “favorites.” Each photograph—whether I shot it in my apartment, or in Rocky Mountain National Park, or in downtown Denver—represents an experience that I treasure.

I shared some of those experiences with others (like the very cool Jeep ride with Chris & Otis), some were solitary pursuits (like the late autumn evening when I had Mills Lake & the stunning vista of upper Glacier Gorge all to myself), and some I got to share with my wife (like a summer drive up to Vail, looking for fields of wildflowers).

Some photographs were technically demanding (shooting a vase of roses by candlelight)… some were spur-of-the-moment grabs with my point&shoot (like the shot of the Boulder Book Store, which continually amazes me by remaining one of my top ten most viewed photos on Flickr)… some were shot in sub-zero temps while I was bundled up like an eskimo & some were shot in the middle of summer when I was so hot all I wanted to do was jump in a pool to cool off… some required hikes of miles & miles through rugged terrain to get to the spot I wanted to photograph, and some I got by using desk lamps & poster board to set-up a little home studio in my living room.

One of the definite (photographic) highlights of 2008 was my trip to Moab, Utah. I had fun photographing in the area, especially in Arches National Park. I’d like to take one trip a year like that, somewhere here out West. Kind of like the Canon ad that says, “My vacation photos are the reason I take vacations.”

I found a lot of joy in my photography in 2008, especially when it was combined with being outdoors, and I look forward to having many wonderful new adventures with my cameras in 2009.

Thanks for reading about stuff I’ve photographed. ~Rich