So I was out on a sunny day and my friend noticed a pretty big spot of dust on her compact camera (Olympus XZ-1). Which I didn't know was possible since you can't even change the lens on that camera. Anyways, I decided to check my camera to see if I had any dust just for the heck of it.
I pointed my camera at the sky and set my aperture to f/22. There are a bunch of small circular shapes all throughout the image, but most prevalent at the 11 o'clock position. What appears doesn't really look like dust particles, at least to me, but I don't recall that it was there when I first got the camera. Speaking of which, my camera is a K-5 manufactured in 02/12. I've had my camera for about a month.
So my two question are, is this dust or the sensor stain thing? If it is the sensor stain will it get worse over time? The spots with the few exception of some of them aren't too noticeable, but they are present nearly throughout the whole image, just worse in some areas than others. In fact I don't notice them at all on the pictures I took at f/8. Since it don't typically shoot at such high apertures I don't think it's an issue that will bother me too much, but if it's going to get worse...how worse will it get?