Originally Posted by Mr Falconea

I gave up on using a blower after I got 10 times the dust on the sensor after using a blower. It blows unfiltered air and if the air is not clean - and it's hard to get a dustless environment - you are just putting more dust back. I know lots of people who use canned air but this needs to be done carefully due to the propellants in the can. Professional cleaning is usually done with dry nitrogen (99.9999% pure) at controlled pressures. You can buy everything you need for this but it will cost you a few hundred dollars.

I use a few steps depending on how dirty my sensor is. First step is with a visible dust sensor brush. This works very well and usually gets all the non sticky dust off. If there is any dust left then I use the Copper Hill cleaning method and that gets off the rest - though it may take a couple of goes.

I also use a dust reduction regime for minimising the dust I get in the first place. The sensors are statically charged when the camera is turned on and this attracts dust to it.
If I know I will be shooting with only the one lens I change it before turning on the camera.
When changing lenses I turn off the camera and turn my back to the wind to reduce dust flying past.
Minimise lens changes where possible.
If possible, I brush the rear of the lens with a lens pen before changing lenses.
I keep my equipment clean - this includes cleaning the lens caps of any dust.

This has reduced the need to clean the sensor - as has the automatic sensor clean system in my Pentax K10D.

I use this method to check for dust - it shows up any dust on the sensor.
Get a lens with a very small minimum aperture - I use f32 on my macro lens. The smaller the aperture, the sharper the dust appears on the image (dust visible at f16 is invisible at f5.6).
Set the white balance to room lighting, aperture to f32 (or as small as you can get), ISO to lowest you can set it to and set it to overexpose by 1.5 stops (do this by your favourite method).
This should give you a shutter speed of about 2-3 seconds.
Point the camera at an evenly lit piece of white paper and move it in a figure of eight movement that keeps it wholly viewing he paper and press the shutter. By moving the camera during the exposure you remove any imperfections in the paper and get a good plain backgound.
Transfer the image to the computer and look over it at at least 100% magnification. The dust will be obvious.

This may seem a involved but I got tired of Photoshopping dust off my macro images. I hope you found at least some of it useful.

Leon