During the past few days I was thinking about getting myself a portrait-type lens for my Nikon D5000 camera. After some research, the choice fell on AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.4G, as other good portrait lens are out of my budget limit.

After getting it I went home to take a few test photos of my parents, my dog and my cats… I ended up shooting almost non-stop and got over 500 shots in about an hour! The lens is so amazing that you can’t stop shooting! Even indoors, in low light, it performs as advertised: spectacular!

I won’t be posting a review of the lens, as there are many reviews done by professionals. But let me say this again: WOW!

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 :)

Now, I should point out that I have no ‘professional’ photography experience. None.

I had for a few years a simple Olympus mju 410 point-and-shoot camera which I bought many years ago, probably in 2003. After 6 *gasp* years of taking photos with it, Back in October I decided to try out some DSLR’s, see how that would affect the quality of the photos that I take.

After some research I decided to get a Nikon D5000, and as there is no official dealership for Nikon in Moldova, I had to order it from abroad.
I got it 3 months later, enough time to read a few tutorials and guides about taking different types of photography.

As it is winter now, and winters in Moldova tend to be rather cold, I won’t get the chance to take a lot of outdoors photos (it is recommended not to use the camera in temperatures below 0 C). So I will probably keep practicing on my family, friends, pets, household objects, etc.

For the next few months I will probably post a bunch of ugly photos that will be “good” in my opinion, so please don’t freak out :)

Wish me luck :)