It’s been one of those long weeks. Sleep and get up early but spend so much time concentrating, that by early evening, I’m tired. Heh, it’s bad to the extent that I can fall asleep in front of the computer while playing games, only for my friend to wake me up to have dinner.

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Just spent the last 30 minutes performing microscopic surgery on my D70. Heh, I was stupid for 10 minutes, but luckily it was only 10 minutes.

I did mention in the side posts that a spot of dust had got stuck on my camera’s CCD. It was an eyesore and I needed to manually stamp out those dust spots in Photoshop. So I went online and googled various CCD cleaning techniques. The easiest way was the most expensive way. Sending the camera to a service centre (I enquired) would set me back a cool AUD$99, money I could use for buying myself a decent polariser.

So I checked out those DIY methods. You could buy ready made sensor swipes at AUD$88. They came in a pack of only 12 and I decided I was against parting with my hard earned cash on things like these.

Went on to the next step and got the cloth and alcohol solution that I could use to wipe my sensor. These things I got through my friend who managed to get them much cheaper for me from Singapore (one of globalisation’s benefits).

Read a little more online and went round gathering the remaining items from various locations. Was ready to get started.

Here’s the list for the items I prepared:

• Pec pads – for wiping the CCD with as it’s 99.999% lint free.
• Eclipse solution – to stick the dirt onto the Pec pad.
• Tweezers – bought from Priceline, these are meant for plucking eyebrows. Oh, I use them for taking out the Pec pads, human oils will dirty the CCD even more.
• Chopstick – to apply the pec pad on.
• Glad snap lock bags – meant for putting sandwiches, but they were resealable, and I needed a relatively dirt free environment to store them pec pads in.
• Sticky tape – to hold the Pec Pad in place.
• A heart of steel – CCD cleaning is not for the faint hearted

So I followed the online instructions, although not to the letter. Made a few attempts at wrapping the chopstick. Finally got it to look like what it was supposed to. Okay, added Eclipse solution. Did a mirror lockup on the camera to access the imaging sensor. Ran the swab through. Took a picture of the white wall beside me.

I’m like, “Oh crap, it’s even more dirty now.” Then I retry the process, I see the same specs of dirt, and they seemed to have swapped positions. Did it again and again. Until I was getting a little desperate. Why is the dirt not moving. Then a genius idea hit me.

I looked at the wall. Righhttt. The wall had spots and dirt on it. Duh. Did I mention I was stupid? So I went out to take a picture of the sky. Came back and looked at the picture. No spec of dust. Well. Nothing noticeable anyway. *phew*

That wasn’t too hard, or nerve wrecking. Just need to be quick about it. Taking some pictures now. Things seem to look like they used to. Nice.

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Cleaning the CCD isn’t that hard. Now, on top of that list above, let me just add common sense to it.