 So if you ever wondered how to clean an SLR camera, they can be kind of complicated and a little bit intimidating. But this lesson, we're going to take a look at how to do that. It's pretty important, and it's important to the life of the camera, making sure that you don't ruin your sensor or things like that. And you can see here in the video, I'm actually pointing out a lot of the spots where dust will collect, which can become sort of inconvenient and irritating when you're using the camera. So to do that, we're going to need these body caps right here. I'm putting those aside. I'll show you what to do with them in a second. And you'll need here some lens cleaning fluid, pretty much standard at any camera shop and even at a lot of stores. You'll need a brush like this. And it's kind of a softer brush. It also serves as a blower. You can see there when it blows little puffs of air out. And the brush is important. You want a brush that you can use on your lenses and then a separate brush that you use more on the camera. You also have here a microfiber cleaning cloth. And this one is just one that I use for the body of my cameras. You can also use wipes. I'm not going to use them in this video, but that was an example of a wipe. And then there's the little black brush is sort of a hard body brush with hard bristles that I use for cleaning stuck-on dirt on cameras. And then you can see the Q-tips and the eraser. And I'll tell you, you'll get to see the Q-tips and the eraser sort of towards the end of the video. So all right, first we're going to start by taking off the lenses is a very important step because the lens will be doing in a separate video. Put the body cap on and put the lens caps on both ends of your lens. You want to make sure that you're protecting your glass. So we'll put that lens aside. And here we go. Ready to start on cleaning the camera. So pick it up in your hand and start by just removing the really superficial dust with your cleaning cloth. And this is just, like I said, this is a cleaning cloth that used to be a lens cloth. And now I, because I used it for a couple of years as a lens cloth, it became kind of dirty and disgusting. And I never cleaned it off. So now I use it as a body cloth for just cleaning off whenever my camera gets wet or dirty or something like that. You can see there I took out a sort of flash shoe protector and I tried to take off the viewfinder. There's a little rubber eye cup that apparently on this camera doesn't come off very well, so I left it. And so I've done the basic wipe down. And now it's time to take a look at some of the really stuck on dirt in some of the really fine corners. Let's spot where I'm brushing right now with the sort of hard bristle brush is kind of a spot that a lot of cameras get a lot of stuck on dirt. And then right there you can see I'm actually going towards the kind of the spot where the carrying strap or the strap for the camera, there's two little holders on each side of the camera and that gets really dirty too. I also just opened the connections sort of little door at the end, there's a little rubber gummy cover. Remove that and cleaned underneath it. Now I'm kind of moving to the bottom of the camera, take a look inside the battery compartment and I would also give the battery compartment a good look and make sure the connections aren't corroded or anything. There's no green goop on any of the connections. Take a look at the battery itself, make sure everything is kosher. Open the gates on that side of the, or open the doors on that side of the camera and wipe out, make sure there's no dust sitting around. And see in this camera, in case the battery compartment had a lot of dust around the inside. So I wiped that out with our little black body brush. There on the top again I'm going for some more stuck on dirt. Now I'm gonna do a really quick clean around the mount and you notice I'm holding it sort of with the sensor sort of up. You can see the sensors in the back of the camera and I don't wanna clean it with it on its back so that the dirt flies up and lands inside of the camera. I want the dirt, I wanna use gravity to my advantage and let the dirt fall. So wipe that off and now we're gonna go for the viewfinder I think. Looks like that's what I'm doing. Because the viewfinder is a spot that for some reason on all of my cameras at least gets really dirty. Now you can see I switched brushes is important. That brush that I'm using is just mostly for, I use it a little bit for the body, but mostly just for glass, just for cleaning off the glass. So I don't wanna use that hard little bristle brush that I have on the glass because it'll scratch it but the other brush has softer bristles. So here you can see me going around again with the hard bristle brush. Apparently there's some more stuck on dirt sort of sticking around that viewfinder and I think we're gonna come back to this viewfinder later with some Q-tips. So there I am brushing off the superficial stuff again. The hard bristle brush isn't as good at wiping the dirt dust away as the soft one so a lot of times I use the hard bristle brush to get the real stuck on dirt off and then I'll come along with the other one to wipe it away. Now we're gonna pull out a Q-tip and we're gonna get some lens cleaning fluid and I am gonna clean that little viewfinder. There we go, popped it on its side there. And here you can see it might not look like this but I'm not pushing very hard. I'm just gently sort of wiping off the lens inside of the viewfinder and now I switch Q-tip sides and I'm using the dryer end to sort of soak up all the lens cleaning fluid that I spread on the glass and trying to catch any dirt and things like that. The viewfinder is important that it's clear so that your eyes can focus and see the image clearly. It'll just really enhance your viewing experience as well, looking through a clean viewfinder. Sometimes I'll feel like my photos look funny and then I'll realize that my viewfinder has just been very dirty. So I'm wiping around now and doing the sort of control, like kind of between the controls there's a lot of little contours on this camera and I'm sort of cleaning out the little cracks and crevices where things get stuck on. I'm using, that's a fairly damp Q-tip but you can see right there I'm actually sort of dabbing some of the liquid off onto my finger because sometimes it can be a little too wet. You want to make sure that whenever you're wiping off a camera that it's not being soaked, cameras don't like to get wet or at least most cameras don't like to get wet. So you want to just use sort of a slightly damp Q-tip here I'm going back around the viewfinder again more spots where I can't seem to get the darn dust off. So around the hot shoe and stuff, especially on horizontal surfaces you're going to get a lot of dust. Especially on this camera because I actually had just bought this one as a gift from my sister and had been sitting on someone's bookshelf for some time. So when a camera like this is in a camera bag it will get less dirty. It'll get dirty when you go out and shoot like maybe on a construction site or on a windy day or something like that you'll get lots of dirt and things like that in there but otherwise you're generally okay. Alright so now we've got the Q-tip cleaning detail of the back there. This is kind of a detail sort of job. You can hear people talking about detailing a car. Well this is kind of like detailing a camera. You're getting all the dirt off in every little spot that a camera gets dirty. Alright so we're going to go back again and here we're going to do the screen. Screen is of an LCD gets very dirty because you're pressing your face up against that all the time and all the oil from your face gets on there and a lot of times you won't realize it but there are layers and layers of dirt on top of your screen and even when it kind of looks pretty clean it's actually not that clean. So you'll just have to go over it a few times and you can see here I've only had to go over it twice. This one was cleaner than a camera that's been used a lot. Generally this camera had been sitting for a while. So I'm going over it with that microfiber cloth after I've wet it down with a Q-tip I'm kind of cleaning it up and again I've found another spot where there's some more oil or something stuck on the screen. Alright so that looks like I've got the screen pretty clean and now I'm going back to Q-tipping more fine detailed corners, things like that. Your hands are pretty dirty and when you're walking around all day with a camera in your hand you can get quite a lot of dirt on a camera. So again this is another detailed sort of thing I'm cleaning where the straps on the camera connect to the camera and this is really not an important job you don't have to necessarily do that but I'm doing it just because and I'm cleaning off just pretty superficial dirt that was around the shutter which can also get a little grimy when your fingers running across it all day. And that's spot where I'm working right now around that dial is particularly famous on almost any camera with a dial like that gets very dirty so I had to go over that one a few times. So now I'm going to go and go back to the mount. So we tried the first time we cleaned off with the hard brush and now we're going to come back with the Q-tip and sort of just run the Q-tip around the edge of the mount and I'm not using a lot of water or not a lot of lens cleaning fluid. I do not want anything to drip inside of this camera so anything that's going near the opening to your camera. Unless you want to turn your camera into a paperweight you want to just make sure that you're using just a lightly damped Q-tip or a material tool. So wiping around again and again this spot gets kind of dirty because a lot of dust will land on the edge of the lens and the camera and then you're taking the lens on and off and dust will fall into the mount and so you want to just go over it quite a few times and actually when I was doing it I had to go over it quite a bit. This is all sped up quite a bit. You're seeing sort of a time lapse version of this cleaning job. So all right, we're just about done with that. We've got the edges, especially around the edge. Like I said, it'll get pretty dirty. Now I'm going to hold the camera up like before and I'm going to brush off the prism in the top so you can see me right underneath the Nikon there. There's a flat surface that has a prism that you're looking down through onto a mirror. Now I'm brushing the mirror off and those will both get dust on them. Cameras are electronic things and so dust is attracted to them just like they're attracted to TVs and radios and computers. So dust will get sucked inside of there as soon as you open this camera and it's always sitting on the prism and on the mirror and sometimes in very bad situations it's sitting on the sensor. Now I'm also going in real quickly with a super super very very lightly dampened q-tip and wiped off the mirror. Did use both ends to do that so it dried it off as well. And that's pretty much everything you need for the inside. Then I closed it up there and I guess when I was doing that I found one little spot. There's a little button there that allows you to dismount the lens and I found another spot where I had missed. You can, it's amazing how many little corners you can find on a camera when you're actually cleaning it. Then I popped open the flash because I realized I'd forgotten that and looked around and there's a little bit of dust that kind of settled in there. There's a little, there's kind of a little groove in there and so you might want to check on your lens. In the back where the lens pops up there's sometimes a little bit of a space where the dust could someday after years and years of use slide down in there. So you just want to make sure that everything is clean. Every surface inside now. So there you go, there you have it. Your camera is pretty much clean. We have one little detail left and that is the flash shoe right there on the top and sometimes the contact points will get a little dirty. So right there I'm just putting a little bit of moisture on a Q-tip and again lens cleaning fluid and wiping that off. This one was pretty dirty like I said because it'd been sitting out for a while and apparently the cover wasn't on it all the time because it was still pretty dirty. So close up that and we're done with the fluid and as a last step I'm just running a racer over those contact points. This is an optional thing but sometimes running an eraser over your electrical contacts will help you clean it. All right so now we're done with the cleanup job and I'm just going to put the strap on the camera here and this is kind of a job that took me a lot longer than it should have so we're just going to fade the video out here and move on to our next lesson. In the next unit actually we're at the end of this unit. In the next unit we're going to be talking about the basic technical things that you're going to need to know to make great photographs.