Is this sensor dust?????

[titanmiller]

First off let me explain the image below. I took a picture of a solid white area of my monitor at f/32, I then did "Auto Levels" in Photoshop which brought out all of the dust specks on the sensor. The black dot on the right is regular dust (it moved after blowing). My question is: what is on the left? It never moved with blowing and I can actually see it on the sensor (very very tiny silver speck). Have any of you ever seen this before? My thoughts are that it is a defect in the low pass filter but maybe it is just a tiny droplet. In your opinion will this come off in a regular sensor cleaning (with methanol wipe)?

Notes:
This is the first time that I have noticed it, but looking back I found it in an earlier picture also (just barely, it can only be seen at very small apertures on a light background color)
They are not this close together in real life, I moved them in Photoshop
This is a 100% crop (highly enhanced):

http://www.candidatestats.com/DSLR%20sensor%20dust.jpg

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

There are some dust spots that won't blow away. You might want to get a thin piece of glass cleaning paper and try to nudge it to see if it moves.

 

[ElFenix]

someone has sent you the evil eye!

 

[jpeyton]

That's Sauron.

 

[soydios]

honestly, just keep your apertures larger than f/8 and dust will never show, unless it's flippin' huge. and if you're shooting landscapes, clean your sensor to get the medium particles away and stop down to f/11. small dust particles like the ones you showed us won't show up at apertures larger than f/11, and you shouldn't be using any smaller apertures than that because of diffraction softening your resolution.

 

[GrJohnso]

It's generally true that you won't see these minute dust particles under most normal shooting circumstances, however...... It's quite common to want, and just about need something stopped down further than f/11 for landscape shots, or even for longer exposures during daylight hours (think waterfall, stream, ocean shots)... Sure, ND filters help the later, but, many folks get very nice results from their lenses in the f16 - f22 range without noticeable diffraction.

Try to clean the sensor and see if it goes away. Start with a blow or vacuum, then a wet cleaner. Most high-end camera shops will only charge about $50 for a professional cleaning job of your sensor if you'd rather go that route. If you can't get rid of that last spot, don't stress about it though. As noted above, there are ways to work around it, including a little PP work the rare times you can actually see it in a photo.