help! Is this dust or lubrication/oil on my image sensor?

[IAMB]

IAMB, how do you know it's oil? I'm sorry but I disagree, it looks like normal dust to me. Anyhow, with the given info - i.e you have no idea how the picture was taken and what kind of PP was done, you can't really tell anything for sure.
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The main reason I call some of the spots (not all of them) oil is the refraction around the borders of the spots. If you look closely, you'll see a rainbow halo around a number of the spots. It takes a fairly extraordinary set of circumstances to see haloes like the ones I'm seeing if it's just dust.





The other reason is experience. As a microbiologist, I've seen oil spots on more optics than I care to think about, and these look exactly like what I'm used to seeing with oil spots and looks nothing like what I see when I have dust on my camera sensors.





I am, however, perfectly open to the possibility of being completely wrong.

[Sinh Nhut Nguyen]

Sensor dust is a fact of life for us DSLR shooters [], you'd see it if you look for it and you're really asking for it when you shoot a white paper @ f/22 and increase contrast/tone in photoshop. Shoot normal subject at f/8 and wider and I bet you 90% of the dust spots will disappear. You won't see the dust spots in theshadow area, if you see stubborn spots in lighter area like blue sky, just clone them out in PS or use the Dust Delete Data that comes with DPP.


My question for you is...


Do you always shoot a white paper @ f/22 then increase contrast and tone in Photoshop?


Don't worry about sensor dust....and welcome to the forum.

[alexsommers]

Thanks again to everyone for your thoughts and input. Although it is rather uncommon for me to shoot at f22, I decided to get a lenspen sensorklear to remove as much of those dust particles as I could. For those of you who may be interested in seeing the results, here you go. Still not completely clean but I didn't expect it to be. At least it is better[img]/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Components.UserFiles/00.00.00.28.80/IMG_5F00_5629ab.jpg[/img]

[Stephen Probert]

Hey Alex, I am glad you got your sensor clean. I still think it was oil since the specs are so uniform. The dust I get on my 5d is not that uniform. In addition, I have no trouble with my XTi which also has the dust sonic vibrator that the XSi has. Since the sensor vibrator and rocket blower didn't work, oil it is, I say, or some other liquid from outside the camera.

[Julius]

The little specks are definitely dust....should be relatively easy to clean with a blower. If that doesn't work, then you can wet clean the sensor. There are a lot of posts on how to do this.