Things have been quiet around the Alpha for some time now  for a variety of reasons, but one of the major ones has been technical. In the course of shooting some minis I suddenly noticed that every frame I took had an odd “halo” effect around the figs, as if I was shooting in a fog bank.

I figured it might be a lighting problem, so I moved my setup all around my studio space trying every conceivable position and combination of lights and backdrop I could think of, without success.

I decided the fault might be environmental, perhaps due to the high humidity that was prevailing in my basement space. So I headed over to my stepfather’s studio to shoot some more test frames. Every one was still marked with the same halo effect.

Sure now that the fault was in the camera somewhere, and hoping that the CCD and/or lens wasn’t screwed up somehow, I updated my camera’s firmware. No joy. I spent several days haunting various internet photography forums looking for others who were having the same problem to no avail.

I hoped that maybe I could work around the problem with Photoshop, and tried every trick I knew and a few I learned just for the occasion. I found that I could minimize the problem, but it was a mountain of work, and the final results weren’t really up to my quality standards anyway.

Finally, after shooting almost a thousand frames in the course of trying to diagnose the problem, I happened to look at the front of the lens, and what did I behold? A dirty great fingerprint smeared across the entire surface! It was so prominent  that it looked like somebody had licked their thumb and then dragged it right across, occluding the whole thing.

Feeling like the world’s biggest moron, I carefully cleaned the lens with a soft monitor cleaning cloth and took some cautious test shots. The results? Perfection! My beloved Fuji was back to its old self.

I can hear you asking the obvious question. If the fingerprint was so blatant, how had I missed it for so long? The answer is that I’m a slave to procedure. I always keep the lens cap on my camera except when I’m actually shooting. Since almost all my shooting uses a tripod, I normally wait until I have the camera safely mounted before removing the lens cap, and I replace the cap before dismounting it. The result is that I never see the front of my lens unless I make a special effort to look at it, and it simply never occurred to me to check the damn thing!

The lesson here, which I apparently have to re-learn every few years, is to always check the bog-simple stuff (what I call “caveman”) stuff first before diving into all kinds of complex, high-tech troubleshooting. Not only does the technical stuff often take a heck of a lot of time, it’s often totally incapable of telling you that a cable is unplugged or there’s a smudge on your lens.

I hope my anecdote about this little episode saves somebody else from making the same kind of boneheaded mistake. I certainly wasted enough time finding and correcting the fault that I’m not likely to forget the lesson any time soon!

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