Photography Tips

Warning! Avoid Eyelead Gel-Sticks for Sony A7 Cameras – Part 1

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This is the best thing I can do for the photography community is give some advice about my personal experience using Photographylife.com’s Eyelead Gel-Stick for Sony Sensors. Right now, I CANNOT and WILL NOT recommend them for ANY Sony sensor cleaning on any mirrorless camera in the Alpha series!

The staff over at PhotographyLife.com have visited various forums over the last several months warning photographers not to buy Chinese counterfeit knock-offs of it’s sensor gel-sticks from Eyelead in Germany designed to remove dust specks and other debris off of camera sensors because the counterfeits have damaged several Sony cameras. I took their advice and purchased a gel-stick about 8 months ago directly from PhotographyLife.com. Recently after getting back from a 12-day photography trip from New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada, I noticed a few dust specks on my much-loved Sony A7R camera.

This was my chance to try the much anticipated Eyelead Gel-Stick from Photography life. To my complete horror, the stick was uneasy to pull away from the sensor upon first trying it out without lifting the cover glass on the Sony A7R or damaging the glass. This turned into a nightmare minutes later and instead of yanking it off, or pulling on it, or forcing it, I gently was able to lift it off from working it on one side of the gel head and then gently removing. After checking to see if it removed the dust speak, to my dismay I noticed a bunch of residue from the stick itself adhering to the Sony Sensor which looked far worse than the dust speck! I was immediately angered.

I tried a few more times to apply the gel-stick after utilizing the sticky paper supplied with the product to see if that would help in removing the residue. I was very gentle utilizing the gel-stick and used the same method of lifting the gel stick from one side to remove it from the sensor. It was obvious! The more I tried to fix the situation, the more damage and residue it left on the sensor! Madness would be doing to same thing over and over expecting different results so I stopped cold turkey and will never buy another flipping gel-stick, unfortunately. I hate ’em now, every last gel-stick! Grrr…

My Verdict is – This product from Eyelead and PhotographyLife.com is totally questionable and I find it flabbergasting that I paid so much from the “authorized source” and it’s a fact, in my book, that it DOES NOT WORK and it will damage or cause further damage to any Sony Full Frame Sensor.

In the photos above you will notice some discoloration to the sensor where the gel-stick was applied. It’s my hypothesis that this is actually the Sony Sensor coating either being directly affected or even removed as a result of using the Eyelead Gel-Stick. It was maddening “trying to fix” the situation caused by the Eyelead Sony Gel-Stick. Nasim, from Photographylife.com, reached out to me and have informed me that they are sending a wet-cleaning solution that will help me out here. I hope a wet clean will remove the discoloration and residue caused by the Eyelead!? If it doesn’t, this will require a much more expensive repair as a result of trusting Eyelead’s Gel-Sticks!

I’ve been doing wet-cleaning methods on digital camera sensors for years with absolutely no problems with companies like Visible Dust back in the olden days. Cleaning camera sensors comes natural to me. I’m hoping a wet clean clears up any visual blemishes on the sensor caused by the Eyelead. If it does not, I will know for a fact that Eyelead Gel-Sticks damage Sony mirrorless cameras and will follow up with – Part 2!

*Note, In an effort to be fair and balanced – here’s an email message sent to me within minutes after posting this article from Nasim Mansurov @ PhotographyLife.com:

Nate, I’m not sure why you ordered Eclipse when an order of a wet cleaning kit with swabs was heading your way. USPS doesn’t work on weekends, so it was going out tomorrow. We have a better cleaning solution than Eclipse, which might not be able to easily remove the residue you see on the sensor. PS had to decrease the quality of their chemical liquid after dealing with a lot of complaints from Sony users whose coatings on AA filters were getting removed by the solution.

I understand your frustration with our product, however, please note that we have tens of thousands of happy customers who use the sensor gel stick to clean their Sony cameras. I don’t know whether the sample product you received was faulty, or some strange chemical or coatings on your A7R caused incompatibility, but it is a very rare case. Do you think we would still be selling the product if every customer had a problem? I personally issue full refunds for every customer who has a problem with our products – imagine if I had to do that for every order out there, we would be losing money left and right. These cases are extremely rare and whenever there is a complaint about any residue problem, I try to get the customer to send me their camera so that I can investigate the case and report to Eyelead Germany. However, in this case you didn’t want to send the camera for cleaning, so it is not in my hands to see the issue, which is why the best I can offer is to send you a wet cleaning kit.

Photoblogging Using Smugmug!

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I’ve been posting and uploading ALL of my images to Smugmug – And using the service to host all my images for  Talking Tree Photo and my photoblog. For anyone who follows my work eion social media or through the blog; Smugmug offers a 20% discount to new customers by clicking HERE and any of the links in this post.

I just applied for their affiliate program and do all my printing and hosting via Smugmug on. It’s a fact that it’s unlimited space for photographers who have a lot of images to upload.

I have done a bulk of research in comparing some of the other photography companies that compete with Smugmug and once tried Zenfolio but returned to SM because the service still feels the most intuitive and hard to beat! I’ve been with them since 2009 and that is a long streak in the age of the internet and social media. Smugmug offers professional printing and through partnerships with White House Photo and Bay Photo printing services which are two of the most professional and reliable fine art printing companies around. There are also other cheaper printing options offered through the service.

This is just my professional opinion of Smugmug and for people wishing to implement a blog, I recommend installing WordPress separately from Smugmug since they do not offer a blog as a feature. If they did, I would welcome it. For image hosting, I cannot think of a better service to recommend!? Click on the “Smugmug Pro” banner below to get that 20% off your subscription when joining the family.Smugmug Pro

The Latest-Greatest Cameras Will Not Make You a Better Photographer

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I love hearing about photo junkies spending thousands of dollars on the greatest and latest cameras knowing for a fact that having the latest-greatest fancy-pants camera will STILL NOT MAKE YOU A BETTER PHOTOGRAPHER. Remember this and save thousands of dollars! That being said, if you are going to invest thousands of dollars spend it on glass (camera lenses) because good glass is still key to higher quality, and not necessarily the newest cameras along with their marketing hype. Cameras depreciate faster than lenses and the latter hold their value longer. I’ve been with Micro Four Thirds for 8 years now. That’s a pretty good track record. Why do I recommend this format? Because it’s dirt cheap, affordable, excellent image quality, and the fact that it works well, being mirror-less technology. In the end, It’s going to be the practice and passion that you put into composing images that will help you grow to become a better photographer. Remember that and avoid the marketing hype. I purchase old discontinued camera bodies at steeply discounted rates and invest the money in glass instead. It’s been a while since I’ve purchased gear and I’m happy with my choices. Practice makes better photos!

Painting Camera Lenses with Rubberized Truck-bed Undercoating

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One thing not a lot of people know about me as a photographer is the fact that I paint my camera gear on occasion. It’s mostly cheap lens hoods but also occasionally camera lenses and I do so to make them more tough and durable. Pictured above is the Panasonic Lumix 100-300 and the Panasonic Lumix G 42.5mm Nocticron!

I wouldn’t advise this if you are planning on re-selling your gear. However, I’m pretty invested into the Micro Four Thirds format since I sold most my Nikon DSLR gear in 2008 to make this major switch to M/43 and since then, I have never looked back.

The only reservation I had about my mirrorless gear is the fact that some of my lenses felt pretty plasticky including the cheap lens hoods that came with some primes.  After thinking long and hard about it, I felt like things should have some extra protection implemented. So I took the liberty of painting my lenses in rubberized undercoating to toughen them up a bit and it really works like a charm! These two lenses aren’t the first to get this sort of treatment.

One of my favorite lenses to be released by Panasonic was the 42.5mm Nocticron which is built solidlyand I used it on a 14,500 mile photography journey around the Desert Southwest last April and May. What I didn’t like about the Nocticron though was the oversized metal lens hood which seemed to scuff up the outer edge of the Nocticron barrel. I ended up retiring this hood and buying a generic 67mm lenshood that I could screw onto the UV filter up front making it look much more stealthy. I then painted the lens including the outer barrel as you can see above.

Not all paint coatings and rubberized undercoatings are created equal. Some rubberized undercoatings are downright CRAP and you should avoid the cheap brands at the local Autozone or else you run the risk of destroying your lens. I’ve had quite a few years of trying this and experimenting and the best recommendation that I can give is to use Evercoat Automotive Premium Rubberized Undercoating for a real heavy duty job. This is by far the toughest paint for protecting expensive lenses if you want to go down this route and give it a try. This may sound utterly insane, but if I owned the Leica Noctilux, I might be tempted to try this method on one of those!

The end result is this; It will also make cheaper plastic lenses feel much more durable and weather resistant. It seems to help my equipment hold up much better under heavier usage and stay new longer.

All I used was electrical black tape to cover up areas that I didn’t want exposed to rubberized undercoating and it takes about an hour to dry and 24 hours to completely set before the smell starts to fade after the paint job is completed. Sometime I put a second coat on to be extra safe but be careful not to over-do it! I’ve had this undercoating on some of my equipment going on 5 years now and it’s still looking new. I just like it because it makes me feel like I have something nobody else has ever really tried and I thought maybe this would be of interest to you. I’ve had people asking me to post something about this, so here you go.

What is My General Photography Workflow?

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It’s a fact I’d rather be making photographs out in the field rather than sitting at a computer working in a digital darkroom. This is probably the reason I have so many unedited photos still sitting in my 10 year old archive. That being said, here’s how my workflow is setup!

  1. I go on a photoshoot which is what I love doing most.

  2. I open Adobe Lightroom on my portable mac to edit raw files and convert to Jpeg!

  3. I sometimes use Photoshop to resize images only for web.

  4. Or I export most images (full-size) to my iPhone via Photo Transfer iPhone app.

  5. I do further editing with Instagram’s awesome filters. 😉 This pisses-off most purist photographers! 😛

There you have it.. It’s pretty simple and straight-forward! I’d like to find an excellent WordPress plugin to auto magically resize my photos upon upload. That would be ideal… I haven’t discovered a really high quality plugin to do this!?

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments!