I was recently asked how should I clean my lens, very simple, use a lens cloth like this. This is a micro fiber lens cloth and some are checkered, some are not. You can pick one of these up at any photo store as well as any eyeglass store. The same cloth can be used to clean your eyeglasses.

This cloth is washable. You can go ahead and put it in your washing machine. Just be sure and use a very gentle detergent and do not use fabric softener if you’re going to put it in the dryer. But I actually recommend not putting it in the dryer. Just go ahead and let it air dry but if you do put it in the dryer, go ahead and use tumble dry without a sheet of fabric softener.

Pick up some lens cleaning solution. This also can be found anywhere. There is solution that is designed specifically for camera lenses but any eyeglass cleaning solution is fine. Eyeglasses have clothing’s very, very similar to lenses on your camera.

So, just go ahead and spray the cloth a couple of times. You don’t need to soak it. Wrap your finger with the moist part of the cloth like this. Open your camera lens, just turn the camera on and in kind of a circular action like this just moisten and get every kind of smudge off. You want to get all those fingerprints and oils off the lens. Be sure to get in the corners. You don’t have to press too hard.

Once that’s fine, I would find a dry part of the cloth to get any kind of a streaking from the solution off of the lens as well. Any kind of length is on there. You can just blow it off but be careful when you blow. And that’s it, the lens is clean.

The LCD back here doesn’t really need to be clean. You can clean it if you want. This also attracts a lot of fingerprints obviously but this is not going to affect image quality whereas the lens will affect image quality so I usually don’t clean this.

If you are worried about scratches and things like that on your LCD screen, there are these thin clear plastic protective sheets you can buy. Usually, they’re designed for PDA’s, palm pilots, maybe iPhones, things like that for those screens not to get scratch and you can cut them down to size to fit your LCD screen, clean the screen and then apply that plastic and your screen will be protected from scratches.

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