Photography Digital | Digital Camera | Photography Tips

This is the most important and difficult part!

The choice of filter outdoors is different for every scene.

You have to see what the scene is, know what you want on film, and the difference between them defines the filter you need. This is the art of interpretation and is central to good photography.

If you are shooting negative color film you can forget about using colored filters as I love. Most efforts you make will be “corrected” when printed, losing all your efforts. That’s why people serious about controlling color shoot slides, or have to resort to doing their own printing. All the color photos on this site are from transparencies or slides. Many people love a polarizer to darken daytime skies into dramatic colors. This usually comes through even on print film.

For black and white you need a yellow filter outdoors. Film is much more sensitive to blue light than our eyes are, so without the yellow filter your skies all get washed out. The yellow filter is the standard required filter, taking it off results in an effect.

At night I usually skip filters. If you are shooting color indoors you will need an FL-D or FL-W (purple) filter to make florescent lights look normal instead of green, and an 80A filter if you want to make tungsten lights less orange.

Which brands are best?

I prefer Nikon and Hoya. This is because of the thin mounts of the Nikon and the great quality of Hoya at cheap prices.

Canon, Leitz, Pentax and most camera makers also supply filters. Camera brand filters are usually excellent, however are not available in many colors and are expensive.

A stranger told me that Nikon filters are made by Hoya. Look at a Hoya filter. They are very, very similar.

Nikon filters are better than the B+W brand because the Nikon filters are in thinner mounts. This way you avoid vignetting with wide lenses, unlike the huge, primitive mounts still used by B+W. Also B+W only marks the filters on the inside, so you often can’t see what they are unless you are looking in the front.

Nikon and Hoya use a circlip to hold in the glass which is much thinner than the screw-in retaining ring used by Tiffen and B+W. The circlip also reduces stress on the glass that can deform it. If you worry about the quality of glass, just remember that Hoya is the biggest glass maker on earth and supplies glass I’m told even to Leica. Although often the least expensive I find the Hoya filters first in quality.

I also haven’t seen Nikon claim for about 10 years that they make all the glass in their lenses anymore. That’s irrelevant. If you were a lens designer you wouldn’t want to be crippled by only being able to use only the glass types that your company just happened to make.

Just be careful when you drop the Hoya and Nikon filters on concrete: they can pop out of the mount more easily than the others. When I drop mine on concrete I have been able to pop them back together.

Nikon and Hoya filters are all coated. This is important. Hoya makes many of their filters available in multicoated versions, also at a reasonable price. I love these when I can get them.

Avoid Tiffen. We use them here in Hollywood for movie making because they just happen to make the oddball sizes and colors we need. Other than that, the Tiffens today seem primitive. Tiffen can’t even coat their filters because they aren’t even solid glass as Hoya and Nikon are. Tiffen filters are two pieces of clear glass glued to a colored plastic center sheet. Because of this they are best for combat and dangerous duty where you will be taking hits. When hit the Tiffens deform and stay in one piece just like the safety glass of a car windshield. Solid glass filters shatter into hundreds of dangerous glass shards instead.

I use Tiffen only when I can’t get the color I want from another manufacturer, as with the 812 and grad ND filters. I think Hoya has introduced a copy of the 812 under a different name. The Tiffen polarizers are also very good and more neutral than other brands I’ve tried.

I avoid the B+W brand graduated filters. They were plastic and expensive when I looked at them. I prefer the all-glass Tiffens for this. The Tiffens are remarkable because their neutral grads really are neutral, unlike the plastic Cokins, Hoyas and B+Ws.

I have not tried Bob Singh’s Singh-Ray grads that many people love. The advantage to Singh-Ray is that they make many odd types and unique types of grads, however unless you really need something weirrd I’ve always loved my Tiffens.

Cokin filters are wonderful. They are inexpensive and allow you to get a huge range of filters for little cost that will work on all your lenses. If you want to play with all sorts of colored grads, this is the way to go. Playing with all sorts of different colored Cokin grads can easily give you breathtaking results that you can not get without these filters. Therefore, presuming you like these sorts of images, with $30 worth of tobacco and blue Cokin grads you can get better travel images than any camera without the grads.

What about coatings?

Multicoated is better than single coated, which is better than uncoated, but the results are not usually visible at all.

The only time you may see a difference is if you have a bright light or the sun shining directly into the lens. In some of these cases you may get less ghosts and reflections from the filters with the better coatings. Otherwise there is no visible difference.

99.9% of the time there is no difference.

How to see what kind of coating you have: look at the reflection directly from the front of a filter against the dark. The white reflection is from an uncoated filter, the magenta reflection is single coated, and the dark green reflection is from a multi-coated filter.

Unlike coated or multicoated filters, you can clean uncoated filters in a sink with any kind of soap and water. You can do this in a filling station rest room, but not if the filters are coated.

I prefer Hoya HMC filters whenever I can get them, although the multicoated filters really show even the smallest amount of crud on them. Remember that the reason the crud stands out on a multicoated filter so much more than on an uncoated filter is because the reflections from the uncoated filter hide the crud. A dirty multicoated is still better than an uncoated filter, even though as the crud gets deeper the difference goes away.

I use 100% Methyl Alcohol, Reagent ACS grade, to clean my lenses and filters. A 500 ml bottle cost me $8 in 1991 from a laboratory supply house.

Tiffen and Cokin filters are uncoated. Hoya, B+W, Heliopan and most camera brand filters, including Nikon, are single coated. Multicoated filters are a luxury and you will see a marking bragging about it, for instance, Hoya “HMC.”

Why do Nikon’s polarizers cost three times what others do?

In this rare instance you actually do get a much better product for your money:

1.) They are much bigger. They are made much bigger than the thread diameter to ensure no vignetting. In other words, the 77mm polarizer is maybe 90mm around. This way wide lenses can easily see around the mounting rings because those rings are made very big along with the filter’s glass. This is the main reason, and a very good one, why you pay so much.

2.) They are more efficient than regular pol filters. That means that they transmit more light, so you can get an extra half stop or so over other brands. Most polarizers have about 2 stops of light loss; the Nikon I have only needs 1-1/3 stops. (Of course your TTL meter automatically sets this). This also will help the Matrix meter perform better, requiring less compensation in bright light.

3.) They are coated. Few POL filters are because one cannot heat the completed laminated filter assembly hot enough to deposit the coating, so one has to coat all the parts before assembly; a royal pain. That’s why most (even B&W and other boutique brands) are uncoated unless you pay an ultra premium. You can see this for yourself: look straight at the reflection in the front of the filter. If it’s plain white it’s uncoated glass. On Nikon if the reflection’s blue it’s single coat, if it’s a deep green it’s multicoated. Simple.

4.) Look at the mechanics: the Nikon filter has a special keyed mount that only allows it to rotate about 190 degrees. This way one can mount and unmount it by grabbing the outside of the whole thing and rotating it as an assembly. Other POL filters require messing around with a tiny little knurled ridge, making it impossible to remove with gloves on. Once attached, the crafty 190 degree rotating mount lets you rotate your filter without a problem, and when you’re done, just unscrew it. Every other POL I’ve tried from Tiffen, Hoya, B&W, Heliopan, etc. is the traditional rotating mount without any keying.

5.) They are neutral in color. I had a bitch of a time finding a POL filter that didn’t alter the color slightly; even the B&W and other boutique filters had mild but nasty cyan casts. Oddly, the cheap Tiffen I bought in a drug store was more neutral than some fancy ones. As far as I know, all polarizing material for these filters is still made by 3M (as acquired from the Polaroid Corporation) and used by all filter makers by laminating. 3M makes many different kinds and grades of this material.  Actually if I was smarter I would have ordered “warm” POL filters from the other makers which should have fixed the cyan casts.

Tiffen Ultra Contrast Filters

Tiffen won an Oscar (or maybe it was an Emmy) for these filters. They figured out a way to make this filter so that it did not add a foggy look or reduce resolution while adding flare. They demonstrated this using a waveform monitor display for an image of two flat dark and bright areas. Fog filters would have let the bright area leak into the dark area, looking like fog. This looks like a slope on the waveform monitor. Tiffen’s ultra-con filter instead simply lightens the dark area instead of looking like the light area is leaking into it. The waveform monitor was flat for each area showing the lack of fog. I realize waveform monitors aren’t known outside of professional video.

Used properly it saves the need to make a double exposure for pre-exposure for contrast reduction and control.

Used properly the Ultra Contrast (flare adding) filter will throw just enough light into shadows too dark to capture and give them contrast that otherwise would be a black blob. Again, ignore what you read on the internet and read from Ansel Adams.

This filter is much easier to use than making a double exposure through the special flashing device Ansel used. If you have a Mamiya 6 or 7 you need these filters if you normally use pre-exposure since the Mamiyas can’t make double exposures.

If you really do your homework and like to push film then these flare filters actually can increase film speed!

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