Lens dust - the reality...?

jezza8

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I have seen loads of speculation over the years about the impact of imperfections and dust on the front element of lenses, so I thought I would do a test. The photo above was taken with a dirty polariser attached to the lens, the shot was taken at f5.6 500s.

I don't think it looks too bad, maybe a bit of a loss of contrast. You cant really see any indivivual marks.

I haven't done any post processing to the photo other than resizing, this is straight out of the camera.

Scroll down to see a photo of the filter used on the lens to take this shot.




















The filter is probably in a worse state than you imagined! (I don't do this to all of my filters, it was an accident while on holiday.) I was surprised by how well this came out, it does go to show that we can get a bit obsessed with specs of dust and stuff which don't make as much difference as we would imagine.
 
I am amazed at the quality of the photo considering the filter condition.

it does go to show that we can get a bit obsessed with specs of dust and stuff which don't make as much difference as we would imagine.

i agree, great post.
 
How about with a narrower aperture and shorter focal length?

Good point, the photo below is zoomed right out to 70mm and stopped down to f8. (again unedited apart from the resize) You can see the loss of contrast around the top of the tyre, still not as bad as one might have expected, and it would respond well to some level tweaking.


 
Now that is amazing! I bet you were glad you had a filter on when the accident happened!!
 
I don't think I'll be as picky with my lens cleaning next time. :)
 
So using a brillo pad on my lens is ok?.:lol::thumbs:
 
So, did you get run over by that car, is that how you broke the filter?
:bonk:

Allan
 
Now that's some impressive bit of testing; and more amazing, the results are.

I am speechless!
 
Wow!
All this time I've been making sure my filters are spotless.
A very interesting test, nice one jezza8.
 
may leave the odd bit of dust on there now!! That is quite amazing :)
 
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