Having some dust or smudges on your lens’ front element generally doesn’t have a noticeable effect on your image quality, but photo enthusiast Alex Bowler recently discovered that having a dirty front element can do nasty things to bokeh. The before-and-after comparison above shows what Bowler’s out-of-focus areas looked like before and after cleaning his lens.

Image credits: Photographs by Alex Bowler and used with permission

Photographer JP Cariño experienced the awesomeness of pro DSLR weather sealing when doing bird photography from a floating blind:

I spent an hour at the least in the water. This “accident” happened in the first 10 minutes because of my poor floating blind design. Seeing the birds were so cooperative I decided to go on shooting. From time to time, I had to pour water from the swamp on the LCD so I could view my photos. When I surfaced, I took out the battery and started cleaning the body. I placed the camera in my dry cabinet when I got home and started it up the next day. No issues whatsoever. Works perfectly fine. All the seals worked and the compartments (cf, terminals and batt) had no dirt in it. I guess you really get what you pay for with pro camera bodies. [#]

You know you’re a hardcore outdoor shooter when you’re pouring swamp water onto your camera to clean it.
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You know you’re a professional photojournalist when you try to take good care of your cameras but they still end up look like these.

These belong to photographer Timothy Allen, who photographs the world’s indigenous societies for the BBC documentary Human Planet. He uses two Canon 5D Mark II DSLR cameras with 16-35 f2.8, 50mm f1.2, 85mm f1.2, 200mm f2.8, and 400mm f4.5 lenses. You can see some of Allen’s jaw-dropping work here and here.

Image credits: Photograph by Timothy Allen and used with permission