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TIP: Cleaning camera lens
TIP: Using filters Part 1: hard filters - Take 20 – with: Charlie & Morgan
Take 20
Reader’s/viewer’s videos
Submission: “Utopia”
Producer: Riley Harmon - Viewfinder – Matt & Brian — Open Discussion
Tell us what you think at: http://survey.videomaker.com/vidcast
View the Transcript
How to Clean a Camera Lens and Optics Tips
Brian Peterson: Hi, I’m Brian Peterson.
Andrew Burke: And I’m Andy Burke.
Brian Peterson: And here we are with Tips, and we’ve got a couple today, and it has to do, really, we got a theme going on here.
Andrew Burke: We do. We do.
Brian Peterson: We’ve got optics. We’ve got optics going on here.
You know, I have been a professional videographer for better than 18 years. And I can probably count on, well, a little more than these fingers, how many times I’ve cleaned my lenses, and this is horrible. When you get into working on a daily basis, you really should develop that routine and that habit.
So, I’m admitting it here, in front of everyone, I did not establish that routine. But you’re going to change that, aren’t you?
Andrew Burke: Yep. We’ll keep you clean and clear here. Dust on your camera lens. There are multiple ways to get rid of dust?
Brian Peterson: How do you get it on in the first place? How does dust actually occur in the first place?
Andrew Burke: I take it out of my pocket generally, and just put it on lens.
(both laugh)
Well, you know, if you’re out in the field, you don’t normally have a whole lot of protection, sometimes you may take a field bag or some sort of protection, but, you know, it just, it happens. Dust happens anywhere.
Brian Peterson: Even if you put it in the bag all the time, even the breakdown of phone in the case, if you have a really nice case, that phone doesn’t break down, and turns in a itty bitty pieces and that gets on the lens.
So, even if you carry your stuff really, really well, certainly it’s important to make sure that you’ve got, you know, the ability to clean in the field, and also in the studio. So, even if it’s a pristine, never outside, just in the camera bag, you’ve got to clean it.
Andrew Burke: Right. Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: Boy, am I feeling like a hypocrite. So, what’s the first step, what’s the first thing you do?
Andrew Burke: First thing I do is use a cloth. What, is that the first thing that you do?
Brian Peterson: I usually use the air first, to get the big particles off, but that’s true, you’re talking to a guy that (shows his fingers), you know.
Andrew Burke: Well, we got this letter that came in, and he said he would use a cloth. We’ll use a cloth here, I’m going to take this off. But after using a cloth, you would still have some particles left. So, that’s why you use air. But you know what? I think I’m on the offense stool, too. I’m not sure.
When you’re cleaning your lens, you want to make small strokes around the, I start from the outside. Going… so you want to kind of…
Brian Peterson: They’re small strokes, they’re not making one big wiping motion, because if there were dirt or anything there, you would just trace it around that much further. So, not one big wipe, but just little itty bitty wipes. And I’m not sure if we’re getting close enough there.
Andrew Burke: That looks like one pretty darn lens here. I think I can see a few little specks of stuff, but we’ll see. Antistatic cloth, exactly.
Brian Peterson: So this is a microfiber antistat cloth here. Now, microfiber, I know some people will have become devotees of just a fiber, and ditch the paper.
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: Lens tissue is, by some accounts, and again, we have, I can’t really quantify this, I don’t have my electro microscope working at home right now, that is actually more abrasive than this microfiber cloth. So, again, we can’t confirm that, but I’ve been using the cloths for quite a long time, too.
Andrew Burke: Yeah. I’ve used paper, used cloth, I used air, all seems to work for me.
Brian Peterson: So what happens if you do get some oil on there, that obviously the cloth isn’t going to remove, the air isn’t going to remove, you really do have to bring a solution at that point. Right?
Andrew Burke: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: Lens cleaning solutions, you can buy them at almost any photographic store. And there is a proper way to use those as well. How, what is your technique?
Andrew Burke: Well, I usually apply it to a paper.
Brian Peterson: Not directly to the lens?
Andrew Burke: Not to the lens.
Brian Peterson: Majority of people make that mistake.
Andrew Burke: And if you have a little eye dropper, or whatever, when you do that, it can get into, you know, focus ring, or some of the electrical, I don’t know. It would scare me.
Brian Peterson: It’d be bad. Don’t do it.
Now, there’s a right way and a wrong way to use air, too.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: In fact, there are some folks, again, there’s a lot of lure around cleaning lens, but there is definitely a right and a wrong way here, so, show us the right way. Tell us about the wrong way.
Andrew Burke: Tell us about the wrong way. Wrong way would be getting the bad parts of the compressed air into your lens, and you don’t want that. So-
Brian Peterson: Don’t shake it, or don’t point it down.
Andrew Burke: Don’t shake it or don’t point it down, or else, you’ll be very unhappy. It can actually damage your lens or filter or whatever you have on there. So, you want to point it up and not shake it. I shook it a little bit here getting it out, but sometimes I’ll do a test spray, and it’s absolutely clear. If you see a white particulate spray out, you want to, it’s a bad shape, you don’t want that.
Brian Peterson: Right. And actually don’t want the axis go up too much. Even a little bit of up is going for, so, not too up.
Andrew Burke: So, I, shaving a haircut.
Brian Peterson: Shaving a haircut to bits. The other thing is you don’t want to get so close to the lens itself that you’re actually cramming particles into the some of the outer rings elements. Back in half. So you can get too aggressive here. Obviously, that can be a bad thing and make the condition worse. So, there is a balance between how things work there.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Got a clean lens now?
Andrew Burke: We’ve got a clean lens, we are ready to shoot. Now, I think, I think you’re going to tell us why we may not want this filter here?
Brian Peterson: But first of all, I like the first thing you did here. Did you notice how he took off the lens cap. That’s one of those things, it’s not a Frisbee to play in the field, although we’ve done that many times. So, lens cap stays on, best way to keep the lens clean.
Now, you’ll also see here that Andrew has a haze filter on there. And actually, this is one of those, and again, I think we’re going to get half the people writing to us saying, yeah, you need it, and other half saying, no, you don’t. I’m going to throw out why you don’t.
Back in the day, before lens coatings were done, there weren’t the hardening process, process that we have on almost all modern optics. So, it was really critical to have something protect that front lens element from even minor dust and scratches.
But the way things work now, and this is from some of my friends at Canaan, hey, you know, these lenses have the multi-coatings, they’re hardened, you really don’t necessarily need to have a front lens element on them, except for few conditions. First, if you’re at the ocean, where you have salt water springing there, you’re in Sahara, you’ve got sand storm, or you’re just in the rain.
So, those are certainly situations where you want to do it. But other than that, take putting glass in front of a really expensive lens is reducing, for the most part, the quality of your image.
Andrew Burke: Maybe minor, but yes, no doubt about it.
Brian Peterson: Yes, minor. The fact that the glass is flat, and not curved, it doesn’t have the multi-coatings that your higher quality lens has on it, in general, in general, lead to lower contrast, lower color saturation because of the very subtle flair that almost always occurs when you have any axis in your light source.
So, that’s the quality advantage why not to use it. Okay, let the letters sail on me now.
Anyway, it is a give and take. Let’s talk about filters, though.
Andrew Burke: All right.
Brian Peterson: Now that we just said you don’t want to use one just as a rule, let’s talk about how you can use filters to good effect. And two ways to it, really. One is for effect, creating a style, right? The other is to fix a problem.
Now, most of us who have been working with video for a while now that video doesn’t really capture the contrast range like we had been used to in film. Those of us who have shot film. So, we can solve that problem by using neutral density filters, graduated filters. So, a graduated filter, if any of you have seen those before, will allow you to darken the sky a little bit without changing the color. That brings that really, really light area down to exposure that your camera should be able to resolve and deal with.
Andrew Burke: Yeah. I have used those.
Brian Peterson: Have you used those?
Andrew Burke: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: Have you used like a tobacco filter, and everything you can colorize?
Andrew Burke: Tobacco a little bit. You know, there are some crazy ones out there that are bright green and orange. I’m not getting into those, but, I always carry a circular polarized filter, and I have a cheap little filter stage that I use, I have indy and graduate.
Brian Peterson: Okay. So-
Andrew Burke: They help a lot.
Brian Peterson: They do help. So, the filters to fix things and to make things actually better, you mentioned one – polarizing filter, a neutral density filter can actually just bring a whole range down so you can open up your iris a little bit more. A graduate filter brings everything down into a range. The UV haze actually works a little, but it’s not a really powerful one, that’s why frequently people use it just as a protective filter.
But if you’re in LA or place with a lot of smog, or just general haze, it can help see a little bit better through that.
The other is to provide that style or look. So, of course, just color filters work. Video camera is actually not such a big deal because you can color balance on an opposite color to give you that kind of-
Andrew Burke: Yeah, white balance is pretty neat.
Brian Peterson: White balance you can play with. For that we don’t even need to use the filter. But the other part is you can use low contrast filters, or high contrast filters. Usually there’s low contrasts people use. I know you use this one.
Andrew Burke: Yeah, I use low contrasts and they’re the, was it, fog effects, and then those sorts which are nice. I actually want to try high contrast image once. And from the rocking on photography background, I thought, hey, let’s put a deep red filter on the front of my camcorder. Let’s just see what’s coming up, and so that didn’t work out really well, of course. Video doesn’t handle red very well, and I could’ve just, I could’ve help that in the post, or using a polarizer.
Brian Peterson: Yeah, so, you’re good. Learn the hard way.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: But, two aspects you want to think about in low contrast. You can do it in couple of ways. You can reduce the intensity of the brights by using a dark, what they call a soft net filter, or actually they the brights would be a low contrast filter. So, you bring the brights down, leave the darks where they are at, or using a light net filter, which actually looks almost like stockings put into glass, and that will bring the level of the blacks up and leave the lights alone. You’re compressing essentially, before it gets into camera, that contrast range. So, those actually fix things for you.
I think, why don’t we hold until the next week to talk about – okay, we’ve done the stuff in front of the camera, it goes without saying that you do it in front of the camera, it’s there. It’s locked in.
Andrew Burke: Locked in.
Brian Peterson: So, do it judiciously, but, for the most part, I think, both of us use these type of filters to fix things upfront to make the camera actually see and get more color, get more detail.
So, that’s really what in front of the lens filters solve.
Andrew Burke: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: We’ll talk about the post filters next week.
Andrew Burke: I like it.
Brian Peterson: All right. Stay next for Take 20. We’re going to have Charlie and Morgan talk about Utopia.
Brian Peterson: Hi, I’m Brian Peterson.
Andrew Burke: And I’m Andy Burke.
Brian Peterson: And here we are with Tips, and we’ve got a couple today, and it has to do, really, we got a theme going on here.
Andrew Burke: We do. We do.
Brian Peterson: We’ve got optics. We’ve got optics going on here.
You know, I have been a professional videographer for better than 18 years. And I can probably count on, well, a little more than these fingers, how many times I’ve cleaned my lenses, and this is horrible. When you get into working on a daily basis, you really should develop that routine and that habit.
So, I’m admitting it here, in front of everyone, I did not establish that routine. But you’re going to change that, aren’t you?
Andrew Burke: Yep. We’ll keep you clean and clear here. Dust on your camera lens. There are multiple ways to get rid of dust?
Brian Peterson: How do you get it on in the first place? How does dust actually occur in the first place?
Andrew Burke: I take it out of my pocket generally, and just put it on lens.
(both laugh)
Well, you know, if you’re out in the field, you don’t normally have a whole lot of protection, sometimes you may take a field bag or some sort of protection, but, you know, it just, it happens. Dust happens anywhere.
Brian Peterson: Even if you put it in the bag all the time, even the breakdown of phone in the case, if you have a really nice case, that phone doesn’t break down, and turns in a itty bitty pieces and that gets on the lens.
So, even if you carry your stuff really, really well, certainly it’s important to make sure that you’ve got, you know, the ability to clean in the field, and also in the studio. So, even if it’s a pristine, never outside, just in the camera bag, you’ve got to clean it.
Andrew Burke: Right. Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: Boy, am I feeling like a hypocrite. So, what’s the first step, what’s the first thing you do?
Andrew Burke: First thing I do is use a cloth. What, is that the first thing that you do?
Brian Peterson: I usually use the air first, to get the big particles off, but that’s true, you’re talking to a guy that (shows his fingers), you know.
Andrew Burke: Well, we got this letter that came in, and he said he would use a cloth. We’ll use a cloth here, I’m going to take this off. But after using a cloth, you would still have some particles left. So, that’s why you use air. But you know what? I think I’m on the offense stool, too. I’m not sure.
When you’re cleaning your lens, you want to make small strokes around the, I start from the outside. Going… so you want to kind of…
Brian Peterson: They’re small strokes, they’re not making one big wiping motion, because if there were dirt or anything there, you would just trace it around that much further. So, not one big wipe, but just little itty bitty wipes. And I’m not sure if we’re getting close enough there.
Andrew Burke: That looks like one pretty darn lens here. I think I can see a few little specks of stuff, but we’ll see. Antistatic cloth, exactly.
Brian Peterson: So this is a microfiber antistat cloth here. Now, microfiber, I know some people will have become devotees of just a fiber, and ditch the paper.
Andrew Burke: Right.
Brian Peterson: Lens tissue is, by some accounts, and again, we have, I can’t really quantify this, I don’t have my electro microscope working at home right now, that is actually more abrasive than this microfiber cloth. So, again, we can’t confirm that, but I’ve been using the cloths for quite a long time, too.
Andrew Burke: Yeah. I’ve used paper, used cloth, I used air, all seems to work for me.
Brian Peterson: So what happens if you do get some oil on there, that obviously the cloth isn’t going to remove, the air isn’t going to remove, you really do have to bring a solution at that point. Right?
Andrew Burke: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: Lens cleaning solutions, you can buy them at almost any photographic store. And there is a proper way to use those as well. How, what is your technique?
Andrew Burke: Well, I usually apply it to a paper.
Brian Peterson: Not directly to the lens?
Andrew Burke: Not to the lens.
Brian Peterson: Majority of people make that mistake.
Andrew Burke: And if you have a little eye dropper, or whatever, when you do that, it can get into, you know, focus ring, or some of the electrical, I don’t know. It would scare me.
Brian Peterson: It’d be bad. Don’t do it.
Now, there’s a right way and a wrong way to use air, too.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: In fact, there are some folks, again, there’s a lot of lure around cleaning lens, but there is definitely a right and a wrong way here, so, show us the right way. Tell us about the wrong way.
Andrew Burke: Tell us about the wrong way. Wrong way would be getting the bad parts of the compressed air into your lens, and you don’t want that. So-
Brian Peterson: Don’t shake it, or don’t point it down.
Andrew Burke: Don’t shake it or don’t point it down, or else, you’ll be very unhappy. It can actually damage your lens or filter or whatever you have on there. So, you want to point it up and not shake it. I shook it a little bit here getting it out, but sometimes I’ll do a test spray, and it’s absolutely clear. If you see a white particulate spray out, you want to, it’s a bad shape, you don’t want that.
Brian Peterson: Right. And actually don’t want the axis go up too much. Even a little bit of up is going for, so, not too up.
Andrew Burke: So, I, shaving a haircut.
Brian Peterson: Shaving a haircut to bits. The other thing is you don’t want to get so close to the lens itself that you’re actually cramming particles into the some of the outer rings elements. Back in half. So you can get too aggressive here. Obviously, that can be a bad thing and make the condition worse. So, there is a balance between how things work there.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Got a clean lens now?
Andrew Burke: We’ve got a clean lens, we are ready to shoot. Now, I think, I think you’re going to tell us why we may not want this filter here?
Brian Peterson: But first of all, I like the first thing you did here. Did you notice how he took off the lens cap. That’s one of those things, it’s not a Frisbee to play in the field, although we’ve done that many times. So, lens cap stays on, best way to keep the lens clean.
Now, you’ll also see here that Andrew has a haze filter on there. And actually, this is one of those, and again, I think we’re going to get half the people writing to us saying, yeah, you need it, and other half saying, no, you don’t. I’m going to throw out why you don’t.
Back in the day, before lens coatings were done, there weren’t the hardening process, process that we have on almost all modern optics. So, it was really critical to have something protect that front lens element from even minor dust and scratches.
But the way things work now, and this is from some of my friends at Canaan, hey, you know, these lenses have the multi-coatings, they’re hardened, you really don’t necessarily need to have a front lens element on them, except for few conditions. First, if you’re at the ocean, where you have salt water springing there, you’re in Sahara, you’ve got sand storm, or you’re just in the rain.
So, those are certainly situations where you want to do it. But other than that, take putting glass in front of a really expensive lens is reducing, for the most part, the quality of your image.
Andrew Burke: Maybe minor, but yes, no doubt about it.
Brian Peterson: Yes, minor. The fact that the glass is flat, and not curved, it doesn’t have the multi-coatings that your higher quality lens has on it, in general, in general, lead to lower contrast, lower color saturation because of the very subtle flair that almost always occurs when you have any axis in your light source.
So, that’s the quality advantage why not to use it. Okay, let the letters sail on me now.
Anyway, it is a give and take. Let’s talk about filters, though.
Andrew Burke: All right.
Brian Peterson: Now that we just said you don’t want to use one just as a rule, let’s talk about how you can use filters to good effect. And two ways to it, really. One is for effect, creating a style, right? The other is to fix a problem.
Now, most of us who have been working with video for a while now that video doesn’t really capture the contrast range like we had been used to in film. Those of us who have shot film. So, we can solve that problem by using neutral density filters, graduated filters. So, a graduated filter, if any of you have seen those before, will allow you to darken the sky a little bit without changing the color. That brings that really, really light area down to exposure that your camera should be able to resolve and deal with.
Andrew Burke: Yeah. I have used those.
Brian Peterson: Have you used those?
Andrew Burke: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: Have you used like a tobacco filter, and everything you can colorize?
Andrew Burke: Tobacco a little bit. You know, there are some crazy ones out there that are bright green and orange. I’m not getting into those, but, I always carry a circular polarized filter, and I have a cheap little filter stage that I use, I have indy and graduate.
Brian Peterson: Okay. So-
Andrew Burke: They help a lot.
Brian Peterson: They do help. So, the filters to fix things and to make things actually better, you mentioned one – polarizing filter, a neutral density filter can actually just bring a whole range down so you can open up your iris a little bit more. A graduate filter brings everything down into a range. The UV haze actually works a little, but it’s not a really powerful one, that’s why frequently people use it just as a protective filter.
But if you’re in LA or place with a lot of smog, or just general haze, it can help see a little bit better through that.
The other is to provide that style or look. So, of course, just color filters work. Video camera is actually not such a big deal because you can color balance on an opposite color to give you that kind of-
Andrew Burke: Yeah, white balance is pretty neat.
Brian Peterson: White balance you can play with. For that we don’t even need to use the filter. But the other part is you can use low contrast filters, or high contrast filters. Usually there’s low contrasts people use. I know you use this one.
Andrew Burke: Yeah, I use low contrasts and they’re the, was it, fog effects, and then those sorts which are nice. I actually want to try high contrast image once. And from the rocking on photography background, I thought, hey, let’s put a deep red filter on the front of my camcorder. Let’s just see what’s coming up, and so that didn’t work out really well, of course. Video doesn’t handle red very well, and I could’ve just, I could’ve help that in the post, or using a polarizer.
Brian Peterson: Yeah, so, you’re good. Learn the hard way.
Andrew Burke: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: But, two aspects you want to think about in low contrast. You can do it in couple of ways. You can reduce the intensity of the brights by using a dark, what they call a soft net filter, or actually they the brights would be a low contrast filter. So, you bring the brights down, leave the darks where they are at, or using a light net filter, which actually looks almost like stockings put into glass, and that will bring the level of the blacks up and leave the lights alone. You’re compressing essentially, before it gets into camera, that contrast range. So, those actually fix things for you.
I think, why don’t we hold until the next week to talk about – okay, we’ve done the stuff in front of the camera, it goes without saying that you do it in front of the camera, it’s there. It’s locked in.
Andrew Burke: Locked in.
Brian Peterson: So, do it judiciously, but, for the most part, I think, both of us use these type of filters to fix things upfront to make the camera actually see and get more color, get more detail.
So, that’s really what in front of the lens filters solve.
Andrew Burke: Absolutely.
Brian Peterson: We’ll talk about the post filters next week.
Andrew Burke: I like it.
Brian Peterson: All right. Stay next for Take 20. We’re going to have Charlie and Morgan talk about Utopia.
