Dirty sensor?

I submitted this image to an online competition recently and one of the comments was "your sensor needs a good clean". Having looked again I can see a spot on the left hand side but apart from that it looks pretty clean to my eyes. This is also a much higher resolution image than the one being commented on which is here.

Am I missing something?

A severe case of nit picking I think...

Looks like a seagull to me great work though

Users on the WWW dramatise everything to make negatives sound worse than they are, and to grow their epeen.

One dot in the window, at the bottom of the 3rd tier, left side of centre just to left of the yellow reflection. But honestly if it's just these two mentioned, it's 10 seconds post processing to remove them.
Do a test for your sensor to see how dirty it is. Never a bad thing to send it in for a clean anyway. Or swap it with my D7000, it has a clean sensor.

Really?

dukatum said:

Users on the WWW dramatise everything to make negatives sound worse than they are, and to grow their epeen.

One dot in the window, at the bottom of the 3rd tier, left side of centre just to left of the yellow reflection. But honestly if it's just these two mentioned, it's 10 seconds post processing to remove them.
Do a test for your sensor to see how dirty it is. Never a bad thing to send it in for a clean anyway. Or swap it with my D7000, it has a clean sensor.

Click to expand...

I think it must be my eyes getting old as I hadn't even seen that one The funny thing was I recently did a wet clean on the sensor. To be more accurate I did 4 or five wet cleans with the visible dust swabs. In truth, at F22 and using the lightroom spot removal feature I could still see some spots but by F16 I could see nothing. As I rarely go beyond F11 I decided enough was enough and as pointed out, it's easy to remove the odd spot. I don't take and keep hundreds of images, I tend to take 100 on a day out and then delete 95 leaving 5 to work on, so it's not onerous for the odd spot.

I'm only prepared to swap my D800 for your D7000 if you promise that it's been lovingly cared for :drunk: Oh and that it is made of solid gold

I think they are jealous and needed to find something wrong, maybe they are a lowly Canon user

Looks pretty good to me. By the way Geoffc amazing image.

I see nothing wrong with the image....looks good to me...nice picture!

To be honest, I see more stuff on the sidewalk and minor specs in the reflection that I might have cleaned up, but I don't see sensor dust. The highly structured processing can make for "faux dirt", as I call it, in the sky. There are 2 spots that I thought might have been, but in downloading the Flickr file and enlarging it they definitely were not.

I suspect the person's monitor or specks need a good clean, not the sensor. Contest comments are like philosophical lifeboat exercises - everyone wants to make sure that there's at least one person behind them when they start heaving people overboard.

Thanks for all the replies and kind words confirming that I'm not going mad and not seeing what everybody else does. Thanks @BackdoorHippie for the more detailed inspection that I value and now expect from you This was actually a single image HDR which is mainly a testament to the sensor on the D800. In fact I think most modern sensors can do amazing things in terms of what they capture, but the D800 seems to be a bit of a master. Here is the original raw with no adjustments. It then just had several Nik treatments to make the final image.