Full-text blog feedJust before I was about to sell my old lens, I searched the web for good ways of cleaning the outsides of a lens.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with the weird white stuff that gets stuck between the little grooves on your zoom and focus rings. I guess it’s a mix of salt, grease and dead skin cells. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you probably haven’t had your DSLR for a full year.
This is what it looks like:
Anyway, the method that I found is really simple. (And cheap!)
Just find an old toothbrush and fill a cup with warm water. Dip the toothbrush in the water and flick it hard a few times to get most of the water out of it again.
Then you simply brush the mucky areas. Just make sure the toothbrush isn’t leaving pools of water all over your lens – it’ll get into the joins.
Rinse the toothbrush if it gets too dry.
If you don’t drop your lens in the cup of water, you should end up with a lens looking close to new!
(BTW, this is not the lens I sold. The toothbrush method worked so well I went ahead and cleaned all my lenses.)