Tuesday 30 November 2010

Don’t Panic!

In June I discovered that Madame Bink, who I had photographed the previous year with Ivory Flame, was moving into the area where I live, and was offering a very good deal for a short while after her move, so it was that I arranged a shoot to take place towards the end of the month. Initially the shoot was arranged for a Saturday, but for reasons I do not need to go into here the shoot was finally set for the Sunday from about midday.



On the due date I set off from my home in a car that I had recently bought and was still getting used to. The inevitable happened and I managed to end up taking the wrong road, but I still managed to get to where I needed to be ahead of schedule. It was a scorching hot cloudless day and the prospect of working in a cool interior was quite appealing.

Having gone through the greetings and an enjoyed a welcome cool drink, a makeshift studio was set-up with a grey background roll and a couple of Bowens studio flash heads, and shooting got under way, with a lot of chat and general photographic and modelling talk. As usual when doing a shoot, I like to look through the images on the screen on the back of the camera, a practice sometimes known as ‘chimping’, and it was after about an hour that I noticed that there were some quite large ‘dust’ spots on the images. I put the camera through a sensor cleaning cycle several times but it made no difference, so I resigned myself to a lot of retouching in Photoshop.

Back home I uploaded the images from the shoot and spent an awful long time processing the images, thank heaven for the ‘healing brush’ otherwise I would still be processing them now. I attempted to clean the camera sensor with a blast of compressed air, but it made absolutely no difference, so I had to contemplate either sending the camera away to be professionally cleaned or do some research and do it myself.

After doing some research on photographic web sites I came to the conclusion that I would have to do a wet clean of the cameras sensor. I finally settled on purchasing a set of swabs and a bottle of ‘VDust™ Plus’ cleaning fluid at great expense. It took two attempts to get the sensor clean, but at last it had returned to its original pristine condition. One of the upshots is that no longer use the cameras built in sensor cleaning facility, as I believe that this is what caused the problem in the first place.






In the meantime I must book another shoot with Bink.

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