New Year's Clouds

New Year's day first few images of clouds. It's already January and this year the snow is late. Today though the clouds tried very hard to bring forth snow, they only managed to spew out a small hail storm and a dash of flurries as the day progressed. The temperature remains in the high single digits. About the only element persisting was the winds ...  cold winds blowing strong all day and all night long.

While making these images I started to notice the big lumps of sensor noise on my cameras.  Both the Sony A7S and the Canon 6D are showing severe image degrading sensor dirt. You don't notice them shooting wide apertures at night (both cameras are my workshorse night photography cameras) though the problem has been put on notice for quite some time.

Shooting low lights at high ISO and widest aperture the sensor dirt issue is less of a problem especially for aurora and nightsky shots. Even for portaitures where you tend to also shoot at wide apertures, sensor dirt implications are minimal. When you start using narrow apertures (f11, f16 onwards) these "blobs" of dirt/dust/foreign objects will start causing you appreciable grief.

Spotting these sensor dirt during PP is a viable workflow for those one or two stray blobs. Once they get too numerous, it's just not wort the effort and time anymore. This is a good juncture  to attempt at cleaning them off the sensor.

I ordered some sensor cleaning tools from Stavangerfoto.no ... let's see how that goes this weekend.