Who here uses filters?

[Janie]

I've been checking out the critique forums and on the black and white shots I always feel as though the shot could have been better had the person used a yellow filter to enhance the quality. I've known some photogs who insist that you use red filters but that works well for infrared, it darkens a shot too much for regular black and white - my preferance has always been with the yellows 1,2 & 3 and the greens for enhancing flesh tones in people pictures. Now, with the digital age, I wonder if they will make any filters for digital cameras and create a black and white mode? You don't get the same effect from digital as you do with "old fashioned" lol cameras,except if you use a digital rebel and use your own lenses with filters - but I wonder how that looks on digital?

Even with color film I enjoy playing with filters - like the sky filters, daylight filters, etc. And I almost always use a polarizer on bw & color!

So, what's your filter?

[another view]

With digital, what I do is shoot in color and convert to B&W in Photoshop with the channel mixer. Someone wrote a lot about this in the Digital Imaging forum a while back. This gives you red, green and blue filters - keep sliding them around until you get the results you want with a total of about 100%. Move the red one up to get more contrast, the blue and/or green up to reduce contrast. This way you can adjust each shot for exactly what you want. The only one I use with digital is a polarizer.

"Real" B&W is a whole different world, but done carefully the results are something you just won't get with digital (not to start a war here...). I prefer the look anyway. I just personally don't have the time or space to do darkroom work other than the occasional film developing. Too bad, the equipment is selling for nothing these days. But I do have a very good lab here in town to do this for me.

[Asylum Steve]

Janie, I too don't want to start any kind of digital - film discussion (people here know I use both), but simply to point out as AV has that BW conversion using the many PS color and masking tools gives you a tremendous editing flexibility that would be impossible with "on camera" filters.

Whether you start with a scanned bw neg or a digital capture, the biggest advantage of using a digital darkroom is that all edits are reversable and, more importantly, can be applied SELECTIVELY to whatever portions of an image you want.

That being said, on camera filters that actually increase detail in a shot (ie polarizer, haze, etc.) are of course still very useful in the field. Oh, and let's not forget Neutral Density. These are often essential to get the right exposure in the camera...

[CaraRose]

I have a question about polarizers... I only have skylights and uv-haze on my lenses. Should I aim to get some polarizers the next time I update my kit? When would I use the polarizer?

[Michael Fanelli]

I have a question about polarizers... I only have skylights and uv-haze on my lenses. Should I aim to get some polarizers the next time I update my kit? When would I use the polarizer?

UV, Haze, Skylights do nothing at all except "protect" the front of your lens. Some people love these, others don't. Unless they are the very best filters you can buy, you photographs will suffer if they are on all the time.

A polarizer is an excellent buy, again, if you buy the very best. The polarizer will, at certain angles, kill reflections off of the sky, water, pavement, etc. Other times, at other angles, they do nothing. This is a filter you use when required, it is too dark to leave on the lens all the time. Get a circular polarizer (as opposed to linear) if you are using a DSLR.

Collor correction is useless for digital. The polarizer can double up duty as a variable stop ND filter up to about 2 stops.

[another view]

I have a question about polarizers... I only have skylights and uv-haze on my lenses. Should I aim to get some polarizers the next time I update my kit? When would I use the polarizer?

Cara - like Michael says, polarizers are for removing reflections. If you were shooting a waterfall, a polarizer would reduce the reflections on the wet rocks and leaves. They also make a clear sky darker blue, making the clouds stand out more. They work when the light source is at an angle to the camera - 90 degrees for maximum effect; a little more or less for less effect. The front ring of the filter rotates too for adjusting how much polarization of the light takes place (but I can't explain all the tech stuff here...).

Get a circular polarizer and the best you can afford. Better ones will be more neutral in color and may have more of an effect. Since they're expensive, you may want to buy one in the biggest size to fit your lenses and then use a step-down ring to fit other lenses. This way - for example - you can use a 77mm filter on 62mm and 55mm sized lens.

[Outdoorsman]

I own only two lenses, and they both take a 58mm filter. So I have a Tiffen HAZE-1, a Vivitar Skylight and a Canon circular polarizer. That's it. The clear filters stay on all the time, and for good reason. I spend too much time in nature, crashing through brush and in general going places where the risk of scratching my front element is high. I only use the polarizer when I need it- to cut glare, punch up the sky, or alter exposure.