A couple of days ago I had a small classmates reunion at which I was the only one taking shots with a DSLR (Nikon D5000), so people had some expectations for my photos :)
Everything seemed fine, but then I got home and started checking / editing the shots that looked good. It took me a while to spot a weird bright-green pixel on all my photos, at the exact same place on all photos. Thus I started googling…
After about 20 minutes of searching and reading, I was rather surprised to find out about hot pixels on dslr cameras. In short, a hot pixel is a pixel on your digital sensor and it is much more sensitive to light. Thus they usually appear as bright red/green/yellow pixels. New dead pixels appear from time to time, usually after a couple of months from buying the camera… Mine appeared after 1 week.
Reading about it more, I found out that I could send my Nikon D5000 to Nikon service and they would fix the issue… that is not the best option, as I live in about 2000km from the place where I bought the camera, and there are no official dealerships where I live.
But then I decided to try something more simple… I remembered that I have seen something about manual “lens cleaning” in the Menu, so I easily found it:
Menu > Setup Menu > Clean Image Sensor > OK. I did this 3 or 4 times, just to make sure. And guess what? It fixed the issue :) I don’t know if it was dust or something else, but usually dust appears as black pixels.
Anyway, even if your camera is set to automatic sensor cleaning on startup/shutdown, you should still consider manually cleaning it every couple of weeks, especially if you change your lens / filters often. And by manually I don’t mean actually doing something with the sensor, like wiping it with a cloth. No, just access the function manually in the menu and activate it a couple of times.
Hopefully this will save some time for you as well :)
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