Camera Care

How to Actually Clean Your Camera Sensor and Lenses (Step-by-Step, No Guesswork)
Video Tutorials

How to Actually Clean Your Camera Sensor and Lenses (Step-by-Step, No Guesswork)

Dust spots have killed more of my shots than bad light ever has. I shoot a lot of outdoor stuff around Denver — trails, open sky, snow fields — and nothing ruins a clean blue sky or a white background faster than a constellation of fuzzy blobs that you didn’t notice until you got home. For a while I was spending 20 minutes per session in Lightroom cloning out spots I could have prevented in five minutes with the right process.

Camera Gear Maintenance: What Tony Northrup's Tutorial Taught Me I'd Been Ignoring
Video Tutorials

Camera Gear Maintenance: What Tony Northrup's Tutorial Taught Me I'd Been Ignoring

I’ll be straight with you: I used to think camera maintenance was something you only worried about when something broke. I’d wipe down a lens with my shirt, blow on the sensor like it was an old Nintendo cartridge, and call it good. Then I spent a weekend shooting in Rocky Mountain National Park and spent three hours in Lightroom cloning out dust spots that I could have prevented in twenty minutes at home.

Cold-Weather Camera Survival: A Finnish Photographer's 3-Step System That Actually Works
Video Tutorials

Cold-Weather Camera Survival: A Finnish Photographer's 3-Step System That Actually Works

I live in Denver, which means I’m not exactly shooting in Finnish tundra conditions. But Colorado winters are no joke either, and I’ve had my share of moments where a camera started acting weird mid-shoot because I yanked it out of a warm car into 10-degree air. Fogged lenses, sluggish shutters, batteries that dropped from 80% to dead in twenty minutes. If you’ve shot in serious cold, you know the specific kind of dread that comes with watching your camera struggle.