FS700 - Dusty Location and Switching Lenses?

A

AndrewSP

Member
I saw this was answered kind of in an earlier post, but I was hoping for some clarification.

I'm shooting tomorrow at a very old abandoned building with a lot of loose particulate floating around in the air. I'm going to try and shoot with my 18-200 kit lens as often and as long as possible. But it's a very dark indoor location with limited lighting possibilities, so I'm afraid I'll end up looking over at my FD lenses and wanting to put one on.

I have a cheap, but seems to be quite good, $22 Fotodiox Lens Adapter that I'm using and an assortment of FD lenses. Ideally I'd take the camera outside and change out the lenses that way, but it's a very large space and time constraints being what they are make this option seem unrealistic.

1.) Is the sensor being exposed to the rogue particulate in the air like that cleanable (or even recommended)?
2.) Is there anything tried and true that will make switching lenses less precarious?

I've found this forum to be incredibly helpful and I can't tell you guys enough how appreciative I am for any advise.
 
I filmed with the 700 near a dusty gold mine dump and the wind was blowing quite hard. I used the metabones mk1 with the samyang 11-16mm and couldn't bare the thought of changing lenses in that environment. The 700 took a dust beating of note, as well as the lens. The next day I sent it in to sony to check if any dust got through, and there was fine dust inside the 700 everywhere. They had to completely take it apart, clean it out and put it back together again. The lense also had alot of dust inside that had to be stripped and cleaned.

So I would do with caution. I wasn't pleased as you can imagine ( but the the dust cloud drag race between to Chevy Lumina's turned out awesome with that kind of diffusion everywhere)
 
I couldn't imagine how the thing would handle the amount of dust I'm throwing at it, but still it sounds like you put it through its paces. At the very least it's reassuring to know sony can clean it out throughly.
 
AndrewSP said:
2.) Is there anything tried and true that will make switching lenses less precarious?
Click to expand...

You have to either take the camera out of the environment completely or cover it somehow while changing lenses. There is no quick and easy solution, but it sure beats paying to have it professionally cleaned afterwards.

This music video was shot in such conditions. We used a Redrock M2 adapter and it was a rental, so a) we mostly kept the same lens on it and b) we took the camera inside a vehicle or surrounded it with a sheet to keep the sand out. By the end of the shoot, the UV filters on all the lenses had to be replaced due to being scratched with blowing sand, but the mirror on the M2 was okay.

 
I've been switching lenses all the time in all sort of enviroments, wind blowing, rain falling etc. and so far I had just one dust spec land on the sensor glass.

I used a manual air pump (very often used in photography) to blow that little bugger away and that was all it took. To be honest, cleaning the sensor on FS700 to me looks very easy since I come from DSLR, where cleaning sensors is much harder because they're placed so deep inside the camera. Here the sensor is placed very shallow, so access is much easier. Not sure if FS700 allows for wet cleaning, but I'm guessing that shouldn't be a problem either. Just need a special cleaning solvent, a lint free swabs and off you go.

Btw, if it's a really dusty environment, I'd do same as if I was changing lenses with my DSLR - find an area that hasn't been much moved through, point the camera downwards and do the swap as quickly as possible.
 
I think it's worth mentioning that the FS700 has a glass cover over the sensor, above and beyond the anti-alias filter, Bayer color filter, micro lenses and whatnot that are normally sandwiched on top of a sensor.

If you look closely at the FS700 with the lens off, what you will notice is that the sensor is way back inside, then if you flip the ND filter lever, you'll see those moving above the sensor, and finally, in front of the ND filters is yet another layer of clear glass. So the sensor is fairly well protected from stray dust.

In a normal DSLR, there is a clear protective layer over the sensor, but it is bonded to the top of the sensor, very close to the imaging surface. When dust lands on this, it can become visible in your photos and video at smaller apertures. A quick check for this is to shoot a clear blue sky at a small aperture such as f18 or f22. Any dust on the "sensor" (actually it's protective cover) will show up as dark spots in the sky. Another good way to check for dust is by shooting any light source with an Expodisc white balance cap over the lens - produces the same results, but you don't have to wait for a cloudless day (plus it's a great white balance tool).

Anyway, the dust situation in a standard DSLR is exacerbated by the fact that the dust is so close to the sensor. The situation we have in the FS700 is that the clear glass cover is quite far away from the sensor, so even if there is dust on it, it is not likely to show up in your recordings. My FS700 shipped from the factory with 3 spots that actually are on the sensor (cleaning the glass cover makes no difference), but at normal apertures can not be seen.

Having said that, the FS700 is in no way dust or moisture sealed (as some DSLRs are), so you definitely want to avoid excessive dust situations. I always keep some clear trash bags in my camera pack for situations where I need to change a lens outdoors or in any less than ideal environment.
 
I agree, since there is a glas in front of the sensor, it's usually not THAT big of a problem.

If you really have to shoot under ugly conditions, buy one of those cheap pop-up photo cubes (20-30 bucks) and change your glass in there.

Frank
 
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