Dirty sensor issue, D800

I try to be as careful as I can about dust, mist, water droplets, sand, rain, snowflakes, guano, and so on when I change lenses. I keep the body pointed down. I change lenses quickly. And I try to do it somewhere out of the wind and weather if that is possible. But, I use my equipment, so it gets dirty.

Still, I started noticing a whole lot of spots on my images that needed cleaning up with either the clone tool or the spot healing brush. This was getting to be a huge pain in the arse–I was erasing sometimes as many as 20 spots on an image, especially in the sky.

Then, I noticed something else…a weird, small, dark diagonal strip on the top right of my images that angled down to the left for a short distance. (Note that this will be upside down relative to where things really are on the actual sensor.) This, too, I was having to clone out whenever I created a high contrast monochrome image with lots of open sky–and that was much harder to deal with than the spots.

To show you what I mean, here is a sample shot of the empty blue sky in which I upped the contrast to an extreme so as to highlight the issue:

I posted a query on Photo.net to see if anyone else had run into the specific issue of that smallish diagonal line, but no one had and their theories ran the gamut, from a leftover swab mark from a previous cleaning, to a hair suspended just above the sensor.

The camera is now in the “hospital” at Mike’s Camera here in Boulder for a professional cleaning. (I elected to have the pros do this one even though a normal sensor cleaning is not that difficult, as you can see if you search around on YouTube.) I brought them a print of the above image to explain what was going on. In a preliminary look, using a loupe, they couldn’t see anything on the sensor except for a few stray pieces of dust. Hmmm… Anyway, they will clean it and we’ll see what happens. Once I get the camera back, this Thursday or Friday, I’ll report back.

As an aside, it’s amazing the crap that can float around on your sensor and, even if it is a bit more of a pain in post-processing, you can still make decent images!

Pending…the post-cleaning update… [Nov 22, 2013 POST-CLEANING UPDATE: Those strange circles and the light diagonal band that crossed the entire sensor are gone. However the strange diagonal streak in the upper right-hand sector still remains–along with an amazing amount of dust spots. Since I am out of the warranty period, I’ll have to ponder my next move. Do I pursue it with The Nikon Store, or do I suck it up and live with it? The latter seems a bitter pill to swallow given the expense involved in buying this camera and the accompanying lenses.]