Hey Ya'll! How's it going this week? Me? It's been a rainy week so I've been doing indoor photography stuff like writing this blog. I have also been getting my gear ready for my annual fall colors trip that my camera club does once a year. This year we're going back to West Virginia for 5 days.  So that means lots of landscape type of photography and hopefully lots of color. It has been a while since I've written about filters. Back in 2022 I wrote a blog describing filters and what they do from a question that a camera club member had asked. Here is the link to that blog.   What my filters do  This blog is going to be a little different it will talk about what filters you need as a modern day photographer. First lets talk about construction of filters.

Construction- There are a few types of construction of filters. There are the "Circular Screw In" type. They are round and screw into your lens. So they have to be the same filter size of your lens. So if you have a 67mm filter sized lens you have to use a 67mm filter. You could buy many different filter sizes to fit all of the different sized lenses you have but that can get very expensive quick. The easiest way to use these is to get the largest filter size of you lenses say 77mm and use step down rings to take the 77mm to the 67mm lens that you have. Step down rings are only a few bucks and you can get one for each size of lens you have.  This way you only buy one set of filters. The next type of filter uses a filter holder that connects to your lens and you slide in the filters to the holder. So you would have a filter holder with adapter rings that would fit all of your Filters lenses and just one set of filters. These filters tend to be more expensive. The system works but is very clunky and cumbersome. The other construction design are magnetic circular filters. Like the screw in type but uses magnets instead of threads. The great advantage to this one is that you can pop them off and on very easily without fumbling with trying to get the screw in type screwed in or off. Sometimes the screw in type get stuck and are hard to get separated. The magnetic ones eliminate this problem. So those are the different construction types now for the ones you need and don't need.

Graduated Neutral Density Filters.  This filter is not needed anymore. It was used for high dynamic scenes like sunrise when the sky is so bright and the foreground is darker. This filter would darken the sky so you would have a more even scene. But this can be accomplished better in post production. You can take a bracketed shot and blend in Adobe Lightroom and use the linear Graduated tool and control exposure , color, contrast and almost anything . The Graduated ND filter can't do this as well. So this is a not needed filter. Now for what is needed.

Polarizer filter. The polarizer is the most important filter of them all in my opinion.  It does what no other Polarizer filter does, and it can't really be duplicated by Photoshop.  You may have heard it called a circular polarizer also.  It actually comes in two flavors - one is the linear and the other is circular. The circular is the more popular of the two and screws onto the front of your lens.  It has a rotating part that you can turn to increase or decrease the effects of the polarizer.  The linear polarizer is typically a square filter, and you will need some type of holder that attaches to the front of your lens. There are really only two positions.  If it doesn't work, rotate it 90 degrees and it will be working.  Both kinds will block 1 to 2 stops of light that travels through them, so you must make adjustments.  Your camera will automatically do this if you have it in one of the auto modes. A polarizer does a few things. The first thing it does is increase the saturation of things.  You can make your blah skies turn them bluer than blue. It will also increase the saturation in vegetation making leaves greener.  It also knocks the glare and reflection off of things. Looking through a storefront window, if you see yourself in the reflection, using a polarizer will make the reflection disappear.  If you look at water and it's too shiny, when you use a polarizer it will let you see to the bottom of a clear lake.  It's just like wearing polarized sunglasses when you're driving. Not only do they darken, but they knock the glare off of the windshield so you can see clearly.  With a circular polarizer, you can adjust as you like by turning the ring. For best results, the sun should be 90 degrees from where you're pointing. So not behind or in front of you, but to the sides.  This filter is great whenever you shoot around water, say shooting waterfalls.  This is a must-have in any photographer's bag.  Price will vary on the quality of the filter. Generally, you get what you pay for.

Neutral Density Filter- These filters are used when you want to darken the scene to either do a long shutter release or you want to open up the aperture of your lens.  This filter is used quite a bit for video work.  But for photography, it's mainly for long shutter release or opening up your aperture to give that great bokeh in broad daylight. Say for example you wanted to take a portrait in bright sunlight but you wanted to use an open aperture of 2.8, which is pretty wide open.  You would have to crank up your shutter speed to the thousands to get it to work if your camera would even get that high.  But when you put on an ND filter which darkens the scene, the wide aperture would let in enough light and you could slow down your shutter speed. I mainly use these filters to show motion.  I can do a long exposure in daylight and still blur a waterfall or have motions of the clouds drift across the sky giving a cool effect. These filters come in different strengths.  They are measured in stops of light.  Usually 3,6,8,10.  You can double up and have a 6 and a 3 together to make a 9.   Or a 3 stop and a polarizer to give a 4 or 5 stop light reduction. This is the combo that I usually use for waterfalls.  These filters can come in either square or circular filters.  For the square ones, you will need a holder of some sort to attach to the front of your lens.  The circular ones just screw onto the front of your lens, so you need to know your filter thread size. (usually found on the front of your lens) One thing to be careful with the screw on ones is that if you stack them you may get a vignette on the corners of you're photo because of the thickness of the filters block out the edges of your frame.  There are also Variable Neutral Density filters which instead of buying a 3, 6, 8 and a 10 stop filter you buy one filter and like a polarizer you spin a outer ring and make the filter darker or lighter. So you just have one filter instead of 4 to carry around. These Variable ND filters used not to be very good but in recent years they have got much better. Thats what I use now. So I recommend them for ease of use and affordability. 

So the two filters you need for photography are the polarizer and the Neutral Density. Now there are all types of cool filters that you can get like "Mist" filters or different effect filters. But these you don't Need but can be nice to have. You do need the Polarizer and the ND filter. I have just updated my digital kit to the magnetic system with circular filters from K & F. For my longest lens (100-400) I've converted screw on filters I already had to magnetic ones using screw on magnets with this kit I have two filters a 77mm Polarizer and a 77mm Variable ND filter. For my other lenses they have the same filter size (72mm) and I bought a kit from K&H that included a polarizer, a 3 stop and a 6 stop ND filter. I got this kit because the filters are thinner and for the wider angle lenses when I stack them I don't get a vignette. Now for film it's a total different discussion which would be a different blog. So what filters do you have? Well I think that's enough for filters for now. Until next week get out and shoot!

Note: The last two photo's of the blog I grabbed off of google to illustrate the effects of the filters.