To Clean or Not To Clean?

Gear is meant to be used.  Using your gear gets it dirty.  That's just the way it is.  Getting your gear cleaned occasionally is a good idea.

My Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0L IS lens is probably my most used lens.  It travels with me almost everywhere.  It's light, has a great focal range, and produces sharp, clean images.  Like I said, it's one of my most used lenses.

Like I said before, using your gear gets it dirty.  Dirty gear needs to be cleaned.  This lens was long overdue for a good cleaning.  Long overdue.  This fact was brought to my attention the other day when I took this shot.

Before I explain further, let me tell you a little bit about this image.  This was shot the other morning in Valley of Fire State Park, just outside of Las Vegas, NV.  It was a fantastic morning and the warm sunrise light plays off of the red rocks beautifully.  One of the things I love about shooting a good sunrise is the starbursts that you can capture.  These happen when a point of light (the sun in this case) peeks over a hard edge (the rock in this case).  The points of the starburst are exaggerated when you use a small aperture with your lens.  For this shot, I was using f/22.  It worked beautifully, I got the results I was looking for.

Now, back to the original point of this post.  The down-side to shooting at f/22, is that every bit of dirt on your gear will show up in your image.  Don't believe me?  Check out what I had to do to this image in Lightroom.

 Use your gear.  Clean your gear.  It's that simple.