How to Clean A Camera Lens

This is a good way to clean the little lens on a small digital camera, webcam, laptop cam or phone camera. Wet a q-tip with the same solution you use to clean eyeglasses and clean the recessed lens with it. Make sure you swipe the q-tip over the ridges that surround the lens too, they collect a lot of dust.

If you have a really good camera and you want to take care of it, get a lens cleaning kit. They don’t cost very much. The kit will have a soft little brush for brushing away dirt or sand, a no-scratch no-fuzz lens cleaning cloth, and special lens cleaning fluid. Be sure you follow the directions that come with your camera, or at least the ones that come with the kit.

You can get dirt and other dry particles off a lens or out of a camera by using a can of compressed air, the kind you use to clean computers and keyboards with.

Use a lens cap any time you’re not using the camera, and use a filter over your lens if your camera is the type that will take one (it will have little screw-posts to hold the filter). Touch your lens as little as possible. And never wash and re-use a lens cleaning cloth, if the cloth gets dirty or starts to smear or streak the lens, throw it away and buy a new cloth.

An eyeglass cleaning kit is not the same as a camera lens cleaning kit. Quality camera lenses are much more delicate and easier to damage than the tough glass or plastic your reading glasses are made from.

It is absolutely critical to have a skylight filter on all of one’s lenses at all times! This way, one will just scratch/damage $15 worth of equipment instead of a couple of hundred (or more).