Port Cleaning

Hello Folks!

Am new to this forum and working up my underwater photography skills.

I was wondering if people would be willing to share the techniques they use to clean their ports? Do you use glass cleaner or just a bit of water? Do you use a microfibre cloth or the bottom of your t-shirt?. Do you put anti-fog solutions on the inside?

Given non-glass ports are a more sensitive to abrasions is there any difference to technique?

At what point do you clean a port- at the first sign of a speck, or when you can see dirt on your photos?

Please share your technique, including the kind of port (WA/macro/etc), what it's made of (Glass/Acrylic/etc) and so forth...

Looking forward to hearing back from the masses!

Ron

I clean the inside of my acrylic ports with the same microfibre cloths that clean my lenses with. Usually I clean the inside whenever I switch ports. Never had a problem with fogging underwater (I have had ports fog when bringing them up to the deck from an air-conditioned stateroom).

All my ports are treated exactly like lenses... very very carefully. No fingers ever touch the inside of the port.

Someone mentioned they kept their ports in tupperware like containers, which seems like a great idea. I need to go shopping with my ports one of these days to find some matching containers.

I use a clean, newish "photographer's" chamois to clean and polish glass ports; it seems to work better than microfibre cloths, at least for glass. With a difficult spot, I put some lens cleaner on the corner of an older chamois, then re-polish with the newer one. (I also use a chamois to clean lens filters but, since I've always got at least a UV filter on every lens, I almost never need to touch the surface of the lens with anything but a squirt of air.)

Frogfish