AUSTRALIANPHOTOGRAPHY.COM 47
HOW TO Which Filter?
AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY MARCH 2016
Protective filters
Putting a sheet of glass between your expensive camera lens
and the harsh elements of the real world can be an excellent
idea. Far better to wipe spray or dust off a removable glass
filter than to keep rubbing at the front element of your lens.
Many people use a basic Ultra Violet (UV) reducing filter
and have one for each lens. The UV cutting characteristics
of such filters is pretty much irrelevant for digital capture
since modern sensors are not very sensitive to UV light – the
haze-cutting benefits of a good UV filter are largely restricted
to film users.
Be aware that saving money here can be a false economy –
match the filter quality to the lens quality as much as possible.
One word of caution, if you like to shoot images at night,
particularly lit-up cityscapes, beware of leaving filters on
the lens unnecessarily. It’s not uncommon to see a double
image of bright lights against a dark background, caused
by internal ref lections within the filter itself. The better
the filter quality the less apparent this will be but it’s still a
potential problem.
I tend to only use protection filters when I know there is a
danger of lens damage such as on a windy day on the beach with
sand and salt spay in the air.
Using filters
Filters generally fit onto the front of the lens either as a round
screw-in type (which needs to match the size of your lens) or
bigger square filters which fit into a filter holder which can be
adapted to any lens size.
The benefits of the latter system are obvious – you only need one
filter to fit on any lens but one drawback is that it takes time to fit
the filter holder system to the lens and it’s something else to carry.
Examples of filter systems of this type are the consumer grade Cokin
range and the more ‘pro’ grade (and expensive) Lee and Nisi systems.
Screw-in filters on the other hand are quick to use and take up
less space but they need to fit the lens you are using. One way
around this is to use ‘stepping rings’ to adapt a big filter down to
a small lens. You buy a filter for the biggest lens you own, and
then a set of stepping rings to fit that filter to all your other lenses- this is the approach I take personally – I buy 82mm filters and
use a variety of stepping rings from 39mm up to 77mm.
Filters are still an essential part of your camera kit. My
recommendation would to be to buy one good quality UV filter
for each lens you own to act as a barrier against damage and dirt,
a top quality circular polariser to add punch to blue water, blue
skies and forest scenes and, optionally, a 10-stop (ND800) filter
for long exposures. ❂
BELOW
Ubirr, Kakadu. These images show the effect of a graduated neutral
density filter. In the bottom image a two-stop grad has been used to
hold down the brightness of the storm clouds. While the foreground
exposures of the two images are the same, the clouds are blown out
and featureless in the other image where a filter has not been used.