The great lens cleaning

Before cleaning my camera's lens

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I've been letting the lens of my camera go without cleaning it. I noticed that many of my pictures were washed out and didn't have the contrast they used to have. The problem was that I'd heard too many horror stories about people trying to clean their camera lens and ending up scratching it. So, I've been looking for lens cleaning kits that were good but affordable. I've gone around and around with various suggestions from many sources but I could never come to a conclusion. I heard about kits with special brushes and air blowers. I heard about things called a Lens Pen that uses a special dry compound to clean the lens. Then, over the Fourth of July week-end, we were in a real camera store. Not the camera department of Walmart or Best Buy - a real camera store.

After cleaning my camera's lens

I asked what they recommended for cleaning camera lenses and they said they were out of kits just then but told me what was in it. It was a microfiber cloth with lens cleaning solution. I mentioned that I already had those things for my glasses and they said, "Well, whatever is good for your glasses will work for a camera lens. Just be careful and don't spray the cleaning solution on the lens. It could splash onto parts of the camera that it could react with. Just wet the cloth and use that to wipe the lens and then dry it with the other, non-moistened end of the cloth."

So, that's what I did. The two pictures here show the improvement. This type of scene caused the most problems. The light sky seemed to diffuse through the entire picture and wash it out. As you can see in the bottom, "After", picture, it's much better now. I look forward to taking more pictures and posting them here - without needing to run them through a photo editing program!

This points out what is nice about having real stores in town instead of buying everything off the Internet or having only mega stores that carry everything but are experts in nothing. I was able to ask questions of people who were professional photographers themselves. They took pride in their craft and were happy to share their knowledge with a novice. They had cameras there that we could try out and they would teach us how to use them correctly. When the time comes for our next purchase, we'll be going there.