Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Racing is a great mania to which one must sacrifice everything, without reticence, without hesitation. —Enzo Ferrari
The American Le Mans Series (ALMS) was a sports car racing series that was based in the United States and Canada. It consisted of a series of endurance and sprint races that were created in the spirit of the classic 24 Hours of Le Mans race. The 2025 24 Hours of Le Mans is scheduled to take place on June 14-15 at the Circuit de la Sarthe in Le Mans, France. In 2014, the series merged with the Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series to form the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
Shooting any motorsports event can be a dusty and dirty experience and sometimes, working in the heat of the race, unwanted dust specks can find their way onto your DSLR or mirrorless camera’s lens and even onto its sensor. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been using LensPen products for almost all of the thirty plus years they’ve been in production.
How I Made this Photograph: This image was made during an ALMS race at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. The camera used was a Canon EOS 10D with an EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS III USM lens at 200mm. The exposure was 1/600 sec at f/18 and ISO 200, with a minus one and two-thirds stop exposure compensation. (It was slightly underexposed that was later corrected in Photoshop.)
For many years LensPens have been helping me and lots of other photographers keep their cameras, lenses and binoculars clean. I keep a LensPen in all of my camera bags as well as one on my desk to clean the optics of any camera that’s sitting around, like the Olympus E-M10 Mark I that’s perched there right now. That’s the same LensPen I’ll stick in my photo vest or pocket when heading to a Cars & Coffee event. And when photographing motorsports? I don’t leave home without a LensPen..
A Clean Sensor Produces Clean-looking Images
We automobile photographers exist in a world where we don’t let the weather or track conditions get in the way of making the best possible shot and many times these realities can enhance the images we capture, so keeping a LensPen handy is more than a good idea.
LensPen has packaged their most popular lens and sensor cleaning products into a Lens and Sensor Cleaning Bundle that includes everything you need to clean lenses, eyepieces, filters and the camera’s sensor. The bundle features:
DSLR Pro Kit that includes an Original LensPen to clean lenses, a FilterKlear for use with filters and a MicroPro for cleaning eyepieces/viewfinders. All these tools feature a natural brush on one end that can be used to remove loose dust and a carbon infused cleaning tip on the other end to remove fingerprints and smudges. The soft microfiber storage pouch can even be used to wipe down the camera’s body.
- SensorKlear II is a LensPen that’s specially engineered to clean digital camera sensors. Its articulating tip reaches into every corner of a sensor and the carbon in the cleaning tip will pick up any dust specks.
- Hurricane Blower provides blasts of air to safely clean the most sensitive surfaces, including lenses, filters and sensors without adding any kind of propellant to the process. It’s just air.
All of the items that are included in the Lens and Sensor Cleaning Bundle are environmentally friendly and work great in any kind of weather conditions, from hot to cold, because you never know what the weather will be like at the race track or during the event.
The Lens and Sensor Cleaning Bundle costs $55.95 and includes free shipping within North America with a $20 flat shipping rate anywhere in the world. For more information and to order this bundle, go to https://lenspen.com/product/lens-sensor-cleaning-bundle/.
LensPen is a long-time sponsor of my sites and blogs but I began using their products long before I even had a blog. My wife bought me my first LensPen just after I acquired a brand-new Nikon N90s film-based SLR! I want to thank LensPen for their continued support.