Manfrotto 175F-1 Spring Clamp With Flash Shoe

If you are looking for something that can hold your flash unit anywhere you go, Manfrotto 175F-1 spring clamp could be your best option. This clamp is a great product and should be a part of any strobist's basic lighting kit. It provides a great amount of versatility and can be attached to a light stand or clamped into anything. The ball head socket allows you to position your flash in any position you like, allowing you to create your shot however you envision it. It takes only few seconds to clamp it onto to a piece of furniture without fear of marring a surface due to the small rubber feet built into the clamp.

Manfrotto 175F-1 spring clamp

It is very handy for mounting the flash units like SB-600 or SB-800 in places where you can't use the light stand. It clamps very well and it's secure. The plastic cold shoe fits the strobe nice and sung so that you don't have to worry about the strobe falling out. The clamp end is strong and grips things very well. It also has a standard light stand stud on it and a clamp as well to accept a stud from the light stand. It can hold up to 4.41 lbs and rotates 360 degree. The clamp is made up of aluminum and steel and it weighs about 0.73 lbs.

Manfrotto brand is known for the quality products. I own several products from Manfrotto like 055XPROB pro tripod, spring clamp, 498RC2 ball head. They are excellent quality products and I love them. Their build quality is extremely strong and sturdy. Their products are little expensive than what you get in a regular market (non-brand item) but worth every penny and it will pay you off in the future.

How Often Should You Clean Your Lens Or Camera Sensor?

Cleaning your camera and the lens is a very important part to take care of your equipment and it helps to produce a good quality picture consistently. Even small fingerprint on the front glass of the lens can impact on the quality of the photos. How often should you clean your lens and the camera? It all depends on how often you shoot and where do you shoot. For example, if you shoot a lot in a beach area where sands and dusts are present, you may have to clean your lens for every next shot and your camera sensor more often than people who shoot inside the studio. It’s very strange to accept the fact that lots of photographers who own an expensive lenses and camera body never pay an attention on cleaning their tools which help them capturing stunning photographs. If we take good care of equipment, our equipment takes care of us. Personally, I clean up my equipment every time I come back from the shooting and before storing it to dry cabinet. It is also very common for photographers to use an UV filter in front of their lens so that the actual lens won’t get accidental scratch and they don’t have to clean their lens every time and just cleaning an UV filter will do the job.

Lens cleaning kit

You can use a microfiber towel to clean the lens body and the front glass which doesn’t leave a residue on the surface. Don’t try to clean your lens or camera sensor with a rough surface material like normal towel or napkin paper; you may permanently scratch the front glass of the lens if you use hard surface material. I don’t recommend cleaning your sensor unless it is covered with the dusts and you are experiencing a problem with the image quality. Cleaning image sensor by yourself without having proper knowledge may destroy your camera permanently. Some DSLRs (Nikon D90 for example) come with an option that will lock the camera mirror up and allows you to clean the sensor using a blower or other cleaning tool provided by the camera manufacturer or the other individual company who produces quality accessories for DSLR.

If you go to the SETUP MENU by using the MENU button on the back of your D90 or other model DSLR, you will see an option called “Lock mirror up for cleaning” which is specifically designed for the photographers to clean up the sensor if in case there is a dust. You can use this option to raise the mirror up and open the shutter so that you will have access to the sensor for cleaning with a blower, brush, or swab as shown in the picture above. You can find those lens cleaning kit online for $20 or less. Nikon D90 allows you to use this feature only when your camera has a fully charged battery or sufficient battery for the cleanup because you don’t want the camera power to fail while you are still cleaning your sensor.