I’ve never owned a filter, so I’ve never seen the box or the instructions.
Actually, they do. Anywhere from 0,5 to 2 full steps. That’s why one needs the filter factor, which indicates the extra exposure needed.
Zebra, if you buy a new filter, that info will be provided somewhere in the packaging. If you buy used, you may have to guess or go to the brand’s web site. Or, ask here about any specific filter, some one likely has just the one you’re using.
Huh. I can’t say I ever really noticed, but then I didn’t use balancing filters all that often. Thanks for that info.
Welcome.
The warming and cooling filtres generally come in 3 different strenghts. A, B, and C is how they are often listed. If one is using the weakest of the 3 (and my dyslexia prevents me from indicating whether that is A or C), then that is a filter factor of only 0.5. Barely noticeable, so don’t feel bad. I sold those suckers during my retail tour of duty ;), besides using them for a few decades so far. The FLW and FLD filters are quite dark, tho.
Still, TTL metering will make your job easier. I’m pretty sure that the T-90 still has metering even when in full manual. Been a while since I’ve seen one though.
Used to be that colour film, positive and negative, were widely available in both daylight and tungsten variants but this seems no longer to apply.
Correction filters on a ttl metering system will be compensated for automatically.
Yeah, and both my Nikon 8008 and F-3 had TTL metering, which is probably why I never noticed any exposure issues. I miss that F-3. Built like a brick shithouse, but man, was it ever nice to use.
Four years of film school summed up in one thread.
Can I have my tuition back now?
That’s why I love GQ. 
Not just technical answers, but real life experience dispensed in an easy to digest way. Liek the others in this thread, I have quite a bit of real life photographic experience, thus we can give more than a surface answer (or that answer I hate, “Why didn’t you google it?”).
But, there are tonnes of things I don’t know, or barely know, so I appreciate all the different areas and levels of expertise shown in this forum.
Sorry for the hijack, I just had to gush for a moment. Back to the photography discussion, everyone!
Most tungsten-to-daylight or daylight-to-tungsten (the 81 and 85 series filters) usually require a compensation of one half to one stop from a filterless light reading. If you’re shooting negs, it doesn’t matter, but in slide you will notice underexposure if you’ve metered without the filter (e.g. with a hand-held light meter).
Anytime you put something in front of the lens of your camera that decreases the light coming in the camera, it will have an effect on your exposure. It makes sense. However, many of us do TTL readings and don’t rely on external light meters to determine exposure, so the compensation is alread done in-camera.
If you have your camera set to automatic and put a filter in front of it, it has no choice but to take into account that filter. After all, the camera (for the most part) doesn’t know what it’s looking at and tries to resolve the scene to an 18% gray (well, in the most basic metering system, like center-weighted metering.) Thus, a filterless camera and a camera with a 3 stop ND filter over it should both produce correctly exposed images if set to automatic TTL metering. The exposures will be different (one may be 1/1000 @ f/8, the other may be 1/250 @ f/5.6). But the density of the neg will be the same.
By great chance, a ‘new’ lens I got from e-bay just arrived. (I have stuff sent to my office if it won’t fit in my mailbox, someday I’ll live in a doorman building)
Any way the numbers on the barrel say
28-70mm (that is the zoom or lens size, right?)
1:35-4.8 (that has something to do with the apeture)
then there is a circle with a slash mark and 52mm
52mm, is that the size filter I would buy for this lens?
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Yes. That symbol indicates the lens accesory size and is virtually universal.*
*The symbol, not the size.
A couple more notes on filters:
First, you can usually stack filters; they have a male thread on the camera side and a matching female thread on the other side. I have a daylight filter I leave on the lens most of the time; sometimes I’ll put a polarizer on top of that. But for wide-angle lenses stacking multiple filters can sometimes block the edges of the aperture (causing dimming at the corners of the image). 28mm is probably OK for two stacked filters, though a polarizing filter is thicker than standard; try it out first. A converter ring (to put a larger filter on a smaller-diameter lens) can be used to eliminate this problem.
Second, polarizers (and as mentioned, for autofocus/autoexposure you want a circular polarizer), though I do use them for sky shots, aren’t optimal for wide-angle shots. For these I assume a gradient ND filter is called for (though I haven’t used one). The reason a polarizer works at all is that the scattered blue sky light is partially polarized, so you can preferentially block this light relative to the nearly-unpolarized diffuse scatter from other objects. But the degree of polarization varies with angle from the sun (maximized at right angles to the sun, convenient if you like shadow texture; and minimized looking toward or away from the sun), so if your lens captures enough of the sky you’ll see a distracting change in sky brightness across your image. There’s also a limit to how much you can darken the sky (unlike gradient filters), and it won’t darken cloudy skies much (this lets you bring out hazy cloud shapes nicely with a polarizer). Also, even though a polarizer is neutral gray, it often does affect the color of objects because the polarized return may not have the same hue as the nonpolarized return. (For example, a fairly smooth object illuminated by bright sun and by bright blue sky will have a yellowish, partially polarized return from the sun and a bluish, mostly unpolarized return from the sun.)
Holy Lord Kelvin !!! My kinda thread. Ya’all are doing great with this. Allow me to mention that color temperature is measured in Degrees Kelvin.
To shift ambient colors to match film stocks, do as suggested above. To shoot decent color images using daylight film when shooting under Cool White fluorescents, use a Minus Green filter. If the lights are warmer than Cool White, a half-minus green.
Colorometry fascinates me. The shifting of the normal sunlight during the day is beautiful to make use of. For example, the so-called Magic Hour light has a very different feel and coloration because the light is not equal across the spectrum. It’s “daylight” but not full-color daylight. At noon, the light is as full as it’s gonna be. As the day wanes, the colors shift upwards in color scale reading. So, you get white light at noon but late in the day, the warmth drains from the sunlight. This might seem a misnomer, for all the orange sunset shots we all adore, but that’s a direct sunlit shot. The color really is altering as the sun drops closer to horizon and sunset. Needless to say, the colors before the sun rises, and just after it sets are beautiful but not at all full color spectrum.
Interesting note. There are manufacturers of real full-spectrum daylight bulbs. A few years back I shot a job for the DuroTest Lighting folks. Fascinating stuff. I have a small plastic Tin Woodsman trapped and vacuum sealed into a large light bulb, that they did as a gift to me. They wrapped it around a large filament assembly and put it in the line, and lo and behold…a neat souvenir. Anyway, their lamps shown in the link provided render very very good “daylight” quality.
By comparison, the “daylight” fluorescent bulbs from Home Depot are fairly cool and look nice and daylightish, but if you used them for photography, you’d see how off they are.
The B&W solutions are indeed fascinating. Want a black sky? Use a Red filter. Darker sky but with details that make the clouds scream out? A 1/2 Yellow, or 1 Yellow. And, so on.
Gee, Zebra, didn’t know you were into photography…and there we were at the photo exhibit at MOMA !!
Cartooniverse
Smile when you say that, pardner. It’s Kelvins, not degrees Kelvin. Yeah, I know everyone and their dog says it, but it still drives me batty.
And don’t forget to spend the ten bucks or so on a 1A or “daylight” filter - think of it as a transparent lens cap. It protects your lens’ front element from sneezes, dog tongues, sticky fingers, flying things and pretty much everything else that’s attracted to expensive glass.
From personal experience, I can tell you that it’s much better to replace a $10 filter with a stone chip than fix a $500 lens.
What it really does is filter out UV which can cause hazing when taking photos outdoors in bright daylight. But yeah, there’s no harm in keeping one on at all times for the reasons you stated.
1A Skylight has a very, very slight (almost not there) pink tint to it. Meant to compensate for the cooling effect on colours that a skylit scene may sometimes show.
So it is essentially clear, meant more for protection than anything else (as said by gpw above).
Another popular choice for this is the UV filter. No tint. Just coated, opticly nuetral glass. Also meant mostly as protection.
With either choice, the higher in quality the better, since it will be a semipermanent part of your lens. Not to worry, even the high quality UVs and 1As aren’t very pricey, depending on size, of course.
Yeah, that’s the one I was thinking of. Do you know offhand if it has a Wratten number?
Well stictly speakin no, if it’s optically neutral then it won’t filter out UV which is visible to your film. It’s visible to the human retina but you wont see it because your corneas filter most of it out. I learned this little bit of trivia on the Car Talk puzzler. Apparently commando missions in WWII sometimes someone who had his corneas removed for cataracts who could see special UV beacons invisible to everyone else.
Q.E.D., I could be wrong but I don’t think a standard UV has a Wratten number, at least I’ve never seen one.
I advise keeping a filter on most all times but get the best one you can afford. It’s part of the optical system so a filter with better coatings, polishes edged, etc. will add less flare than a cheap $10 filter. I stick with Heliopan or B+W. Keep them clean too. I’ve been dissatisfied with most cleaning solutions and wipes but I switched to Pec pads and the same Eclipse fluid I use for cleaning the sensor in my D100.
Ham§sters keep eating this! Argh!
I’m not aware of the UV having a Wratten number, but they might. The Wratten numbers are used for colour compensating or contrast enhancement, for the most part. Like #8 Light Yellow, #25 Red, or #82A Light Blue. Some colour meters can be set to read out in Wr #s, which is cool. Or warm or nuetral…
I will try to find to an online ref for the Wrattens, if not, I may just write one out from one of my books (if I can the one on filters, that is.)
The Kodak Dataguide would have it. I’ll look for a link to that.