We don’t talk about technical stuff often on the blog, but we thought it might be good to talk about cleaning your photography gear. If you take your camera out fairly regularly, it’s likely you’ll need to clean the camera and the lenses. There’s no need to go crazy every time you go out, but cleaning every once in a while is helpful. Speckles on lenses can even impact your images if you shoot starbursts or at night with bright lights.

Let’s go through a few tools that will make cleaning your photography gear easy.

Dust blower

You should probably start by removing dust and particles. A good dust blower like the Giottos Rocket Blaster does the trick. You can blow on the front and back elements of the lens, and on the areas of your camera that are hard to reach (like the viewfinder or around your back screen).

Lenspen

If the glass of your lens (or viewfinder) has some smears, then you need another tool, the Lenspen Lens Cleaner. One end of the Lenspen is a brush that you can use to remove any particles that are stuck to the glass. The other end is a cleaning tip, which you can brush over the glass and it will remove just about anything. A great tool, that’s also cheap and portable.

Lens cloth & cleaning solution

If this wasn’t enough, then you need to get wet! What you need is cleaning fluid and a lens cloth. You can use any cleaning solution, but we recommend using one made for camera equipment, like  Eclipse Optic Cleaning Solution. Any microfiber cloth will do the trick.

Apply a few drops on your cloth and start wiping your lens. If it smears, you can use the Lenspen to finish it up.

These tools are all inexpensive and easy to pack in your camera bag. Next week, we’ll talk about sensor cleaning, as it’s a whole other topic! In the meantime, let us know in the comments if you use other great tools!