How I remove dust from my camera sensor

This is a Fess, Little noses snot sucker. The idea is you compress the bulb, then insert into your baby's nose, release the bulb and suck out the snot.

It works awesomely for that purpose, to extract blockages up your baby's nose. It quite frankly grossed my husband out. He doesn't do snot, or poo. He's a fogging woos.

When you're a breastfeeding mum and you have a baby taking umpteen breaths just to have a feed, you do what you can. Especially if that babe is holding on to your nipple with it's teeth, as not to let go of the food source when they are taking that breath. You try ANYTHING!

I did use it. It's a useful thing.

Problem is it's been sitting in my junk draw for the last four years. It's only useful on little babies who can't blow their own nose.

It's not likely you will be able to get rid of it second hand in a hurry. Because SNOT.

I did however find a use for it. It's now in my camera bag. You see I had an annoying, annoying shadow on my photos. It was giving me the shits and after a google search(what else), I found it was from dust on my camera sensor. Before this day, I had no idea what the fog a camera sensor was. I thought it was just dust, or a mark on my lens.

I thought I was doomed, because there was no way I could replace a lens, let alone a Canon camera.

It was a relief finding out what I needed to do, but I didn't have a blower. We have an air compressor in the shed, which was highly recommended I didn't use. I did remember the sucker I had in the junk draw. Only I'd be using it in the reverse, of it's intended use.

The day I realised I had the blight on my photos, was a blustery day at the beach. Got great photos of the fam with our neighbours, but also ended up with a grain of sand, sucked into the camera body, onto the sensor.

I did a lot of photoshopping to get rid of the shadow on a heap of photos. It's inconvenient and sometimes not successful, depending where the blight is.

After putting the Canon EOS camera setting on manual cleaning (which lifts the mirror), I could see the tiniest grain of sand I couldn't see with the mirror in the way. Making sure I did NOT touch the sensor I gave the sensor a puff from the snot sucker, pushing air out as quickly as I could.

I saw the grain of sand disappear before my eyes. Make sure you hold the camera with the sensor facing down, so that whatever is blown out will fall out of the camera body for good. Turn the camera off and the mirror will go back into place.

I put the lens back on and took a photo. No blight. It was gone. Thank fog!

So the snot sucker is now an accessory in my camera bag, for the next time a foreign body finds it's way onto my camera sensor! I have learnt something useful, and it wasn't as scary to fix as I thought. Good old Google.  

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