I searched for a clean brush, put the camera in sensor cleaning mode and started sweeping the filter.
Well... I got rid of the original dust specs, but introduced a lot of new ones instead.. Aarggh!
After 30 minutes of sweeping my dust-tracking photo looked like this:
It looks terrible, doesnt' it? The picture is created by photographing an even grey surface at close distance with a zoom lens zoomed to 200 mm and manually focused to infinity and at the smallest possible aperture, in this case f: 32.
In real life, the only dust specs you can spot were the two big ones in the upper-mid part of the picture and they would start to emerge at apertures above f:11 and the smaller spots at f:16 to f:22.
Photographing could continue with some limitations like apertures below f:11, if possible, and arranging pictures so that even surfaces like walls or the sky would not coincide with the dirtiest parts.
In the meantime I ordered some cleaning equipment from here: Micro-tools in Germany (yes this stuff can be found in Finland as well, but at twice the price) and found this eminent website: www.cleaningdigitalcameras.com where one can find all the information one needs to successfully clean one's sensor.
When the stuff arrived I went to work with good confidence and after two rounds of sweeping using "the Wet Method" my dust picture looks like this:
Great improvement indeed. The remaining dust specs seen in the picture are so small that they will hardly show up in any picture unless the aperture is smaller than f:22 and they happen to coincide with an even surface.
When I started to search for dust in the D300 I found out that the Dust Removing (shaking the filter at start and shut down) feature was shut off and has so been since we bought this camera! It is now turned on! :)
We have been suffering low temperatures for the last two weeks, but today it is slightly above zero! Yay!
