Dear Stay Focussed reader,

Welcome to the digital-photography-tips.net newsletter, and happy Election Day if you're in the UK!

Recently I treated myself to a new mobile phone. It's been four and a half years since I bought my last phone and it was getting a bit long in the tooth.

After plenty of research I plumped for a new touchscreen smart phone (not an iPhone I hasten to add – they cost a fortune and there was no way I was going to get that one past my wife!)

Anyway, I was keen on my purchase, and keen also to keep the screen looking its best. So I invested in a screen protector. And right before I fitted it I remembered an old trick about sensor cleaning.

Tip: how to create a dust free environment for sensor cleaning

If you have a digital SLR, more than a couple of years old, it might not have a built in sensor cleaning function. After a while dust spots can appear on it. These are easy to detect because they are always in the same place in every photo.

Time to clean the sensor! You'll need a sensor cleaning kit (freely available on the internet – my personal favourite is Sensor Swab, but there are plenty to choose from). And you'll also need a fairly dust free environment.

And the dust free environment is what I also needed when I was applying my screen protector to my nice new phone.

Here's my tip – go to the bathroom. It has more hard surfaces than other rooms in the house and consequently less dust floating around. Then run the shower for a couple of minutes. The aim is to build up some steam.

Once that's done wait until the air clears. As it clears the water droplets take any dust in the air with them. And now you have a nice clean dust free room!

Now you can clean your sensor and not have to worry about adding more dust that you're taking off.

And by the way, my screen protector went on perfectly – not a trace of dust trapped under it at all!

Pearls from the forums

I get a lot of submissions to the site, and unfortunately I can't upload them all (so apologies if you've made a submission and you haven't seen it). Here are some of my recent favourites:

• Robin in a Tree, by Peter.

• Behind Bars, by Wendell.

• Winning, by Joaquim.

Help wanted!

My aim is to share digital-photography-tips.net, and this newsletter with as many people around the world as possible- helping the whole world take better photos!

If you know of someone who would be interested in receiving this newsletter, please forward this email onto them, and ask them to click here, or send them this link:

https://www.digital-photography-tips.net/Digital-photography-tips-newsletter.html

Thanks for your help,

Darrell