Cleaning Your Camera Sensor using the VSGO APS-C Sensor Cleaning Kit

First to clarify: I do not receive any money, reimbursements or free products from VSGO or anyone else to promote this product. The reason why I use the VSGO kit is purely because for me the product is good and the price is also good, no more no less.

In any case, I would advise cleaning your camera sensor once a year, unless you use your camera little or hardly ever change lenses.
But you can always test this to be sure.
I would certainly do the following before you start cleaning, so you can better assess whether your cleaning was successful.
Just go outside and take a Jpg picture of the open sky, lens doesn’t really matter, but a standard lens or lens up to 135mm might be easier not to get anything on your picture other than just sky. Set your aperture to f11 or f16 and adjust your shutter speed and Iso to have a roughly normal exposure.

In order to determine the degree of pollution, you then open the picture you just took in for example Gimp, at first sight you may already see something but probably not completely clear. You can improve this by choosing “invert color” – 2nd example – or adjusting the contrast of your picture as in the 3rd example.

For Linux users, Krita can also be used to get the same result via: filter – adjust – auto contrast :

Ok, when you have done and seen the previous, it is obvious to follow the next step : How To Clean Your Mirrorless Camera Sensor using the VSGO APS-C Sensor Cleaning Kit.

All the following advice may make sense, but sometimes you can overlook things, so first the steps of preparation.

Provide a sensor safe environment :

• reasonably dust-free environment (not in the bedroom)
• no humid environment (not in the bathroom)
• enough light
• dirt and dust clean work surface
• remove the battery from the camera before you start cleaning!
  Necessities :
• Air blower
• VSGO APS-C Sensor Cleaning Kit (or any cleaning kit with fluid and cleaning swabs)

First step : use the airblower
Make sure the air blower does not contain dust particles by blowing it several times in a different direction than your work surface where your camera is.
Remove the lens of the camera – hold the front of the air blower with one hand to ensure a fixed, stable and safe position – then blow firmly a few times in the direction of the sensor.
After this action, the sensor may already be clean and the use of swabs not necessary. Mount a lens and take a test picture again, follow the steps in the beginning of the article. You can stop here when you no longer notice any or hardly any pollution. Otherwise, go to the next step.

Step two : If dust particles are still visible on the test pictures, take the VSGO Sensor cleaning kit.
Take one new unused cleaning swab and the bottle of cleaning fluid
Open and remove the swab from the packaging without touching the tip
Open the bottle of cleaning fluid and apply two drops to the tip of the swab
Remove the lens or lens cap from your camera (camera battery removed ?)
Place the swab on the sensor at an angle of about 60 ° and start at the top left corner, gently move the swab from left to right. Repeat that process at the bottom left.
In the end, flip the swab over and repeat the above process.
Turn the camera upright or upside down to prevent new dust particles from entering. Give the sensor a few seconds to dry out. Mount a lens and repeat the procedure to make sure your sensor is clean (don’t forget battery in for picture) – if not, repeat the cleaning steps with a new swab (battery out again).

Below is a video of a sensor cleaning that I recently performed myself, it is subtitled, activate via the keyboard icon. The text runs fairly quickly, but you can always fall back on the written text above, but actually seeing how it happens seemed useful to me.

Think of the environment !
Place the swab back in the packaging, it is no longer usable for cleaning your sensor, but it is still perfectly usable for cleaning your lenses or other parts of your camera. Although you have to be careful with it, these days such a swab is also the ideal tool to disinfect your camera or smartphone with alcohol after a trip. Do not forget that wherever you go and touch things with your hands, you will also bring it to your camera and/or smartphone afterwards.