Basic Analogue Gear Cleaning and Upkeep: Take Care of your Third Eye!

Finally spring has arrived! Ready to get out and shoot amazing pictures? Have your gear ready? Have you properly cleaned you camera and lens from the winter dust? Here are a few tips on how I clean mine.

You can see, this is my “weapon-of-choice” camera, I love her and ever since I took care of giving it a good clean up and changing the battery too.

Everything I use are simple household items you can find everywhere:

• Glass cleaning liquid
• Microfiber cloth
• Ear cleaning cotton stick

Easy, right?
Just take the cloth and pass it all around your camera to take off any dust, in this way if there’s dust it wont go inside the camera.

Start pouring some glass cleaner on the cotton stick and clean up the viewfinder, then with the dry part you can dry any remaining liquid.

Now, take your camera lens off.
If you think you might do any unwanted damage, skip this step, the mirror is a vital and sensitive aprt of the camera.

With a new clean stick, pour some liquid and gently clean the mirror from eventual dust or speckles with the wet part and dry with the dry part of the stick.

At this point i clean the lens and camera mount from any dust or grey/black lines present. It’s not vital but an optional step, and it’s useful to clean the lens contacts too.

Reverse the camera and open the back.

I usually clean the inside of the camera because the film back is the part of the camera more subject to dust so it’s a good thing to clean the chamber where we put the film roll inside and the rolls on the film advancing mechanism.
If you want, you can clean the film transport guides.

The other important part is the pressure plate. This plate helps the film to stay in it’s place and it slide easily, sometimes what happens is that we put our fingerprints on this plate, risking putting dirt on the film back.
As in the previous steps, use a wet stick to clean and a dry one to dry the excess liquid.

THE LAST AND IMPORTANT STEP!

Clean out you own lenses, your eye!
I use eyewash to keep my eyes fresh and clean.

Hope you enjoy this little tipster!

written by yayoboy on 2013-04-03 #gear #tutorials #film #spring #camera #gear #clean-up #tipster #clean #care #select-type-of-tipster #select-what-this-tipster-is-about #basic-analogue-gear-cleaning-and-upkeep