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The Gadget Bag: Lens Accessories

Next topic is lens accessories, and boy do we have a lot of things to talk about here. There's a lot of things that you can attach on the front, the backside of the lenses. Let's go ahead and start with the filters. Okay. On the front of our lens, we can start a major argument in any photography forum about using using filters or not using filters. It appears to me that all the cool kids have said, "Don't use filters. You don't need them," and that you're stupid if you put on this little protective piece of glass on the front of your lens. It's very much a personal choice as to whether you want to do this. The idea about using filters in the past was to have an ultra-violet filter, which would cut down on some of the ultra-violet light that our camera film would pick up that our eyes weren't seeing. It was trying to get the look back to what we see with our own eyes. Nowadays, they're often still called UV filters, and they are simply protection filters. This is a matter of, well, how ...

do you want to deal with the front of your lens? The front of your lens is well-coated. It's a very hard piece of glass, and it's relatively hard to scratch, break, or do anything terrible to. It's amazing at how much abuse you can give it and have it still be okay. If you do want to protect it, a clear UV filter is gonna have extremely small impact on any sort of image quality. I would hazard a guess that I could easily shoot photos with and without the filter, and not have anybody anywhere be able to tell the difference in sharpness. One area that you might see a little bit of difference is in a flare situation, so if you have light hitting the front of the lens, and it's, you don't have a hood or shade, and it's really bouncing around in there, you might get some more flare problems in there. It's really a personal choice as to whether you want to do this. I have used a UV filter on my lenses for several, several years, but it goes to another fact that I'm not gonna get into here, which is the question of whether you want to use a lens cap or not. I find lens caps as one of the most annoying items in the world of photography. I hate pulling out a camera, getting ready to shoot, and then there's a lens cap on it. I don't keep lens caps on any of my cameras, except for the lenses that are so bulbous I can't physically put a lens cap, like a fish-eye lens on there. I store my cameras in my bag with a filter on, pick 'em up, and I shoot 'em. Because of that, they go in and out of the bag. They get a little bit more use than one with a lens cap on it. I might need to replace my filter about every ten years, which is not really that big a deal in my mind. I use filters because I don't want to use lens caps. They're a hassle. You will definitely never see me with a little lens cap hanging down on a little string. That's like the worst ever. When somebody asks me to take a photo with their camera, and this thing is dadang, dadang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, I just, it's annoying. It's crazy. Don't let my opinions interfere with what you actually do, okay? We've had the option of UV filter, and then we have the option of the polarizer filter. Now, as we made our way from film to digital, there's all sorts of filters that we used in the film world that we just don't need anymore, for instance, like a yellow and an orange filter. Generally speaking, we just don't need those filters, because we can do that in Photoshop or some other program. The polarizer still holds value because it would be virtually impossible to mimic this in Photoshop or some other program. The polarizer is gonna help reduce the amount of light coming from certain angles in relationship to where you are. It is a filter that you are going to screw onto your lens, and then you can continue to rotate, depending on your position and alignment with the light that is illuminating that particular scene. You'll be able to see this adjustment just holding the polarizer up to your eye. A lot of you, I bet, have polarized sunglasses. You can actually see this just with your sunglasses on. In this case, we have either no polarizing or minimum polarizing, and you'll notice that you can see the reflections of the tree in this pond. Let's go ahead and turn this polarizer, and notice the difference with this image here. Now, we can see the fish in the water, so it is reducing the reflections coming from light at a 45 degree angle. Let's go back to minimum, just to show you what it looked like in the beginning. Now we're seeing the reflections of the trees. Think how hard that would be to do in Photoshop. That'd be a lot of work. I think someone is good enough to do it, but it would be really, really hard to do. Anytime I'm working around water, especially off a boat, that's when I'm really gonna want a polarizer, because I can cut through some of those reflections that I'm getting on the water and see what is in the water more clearly. It works in a lot of different other areas. Here, I'm actually in a forest and this leaf has a lot of white light, coming down through the canopy, reflecting off of it, and it's kind of taking away from the color of it. Here you can see the difference. On the left, without a polarizer, and on the right, with a polarizer. There's many different environments. Here in the forest, let's go ahead and add a polarizer. Watch the vegetation saturation change here, as we go to a polarizer. It can help out quite a bit. Now, this is a short video clip of me with a telephoto lens, and I am turning the polarizer. You'll notice the reflections coming off the edge of the tulips. How much more saturation and how much it's cutting down on those reflections coming off the sides of those tulips. It has a huge impact. You can see this right through the view finder, right as you're shooting a picture. All right, so you're in Seattle. You're up at Kerry Park. You want to shoot a picture of downtown Seattle at sunset. Look at what the polarizer does. Now, as this is going back and forth here, notice Mount Rainier in the background, and notice where the sun is coming from. The sun is illuminating the right side of the mountain, so this is a side-lit situation. This is where polarizers are going to have the most impact, is in a side-lit situation here. One of the big reasons for you using this is we can take an image and really get some nice saturation color out of that sky. Nice saturated color. Notice the blocks, towering blocks here, get a little bit more yellow. Nice yellow saturation in it. Very handy on a sunny day. This is another early morning sunrise. Where is the sun? Look at the Space Needle. You can see it's side-lit, light coming from the right-hand side. Let's go ahead and add a polarizer to this. Look at the significant change here in the look. You can choose as to which one you think is better. They are two very different images. I'm not saying that it radically improved the picture, but it did change it in a huge way. You'll find that in some situations, you will have more impact than others. This is one of the greatest impacts that I have seen. I was really surprised, which is why I am constantly, even though I have been working with polarizers for 30 years, I pull it out of the camera bag, and I hold it up to my eye to see what it does, and I'm sometimes like, "Wow, wonder why it doesn't do it much here," and trying to figure out what's going on with the lighting. In some cases, it's really strong. There's a number of cases where you might want to use it. You want to get that really blue sky, but you don't wanna affect the tonality of the wheel that you're photographing here. It really makes that blue sky really deep, dark blue. Anytime you want a little bit more texture in that blue sky, if you are in a side-lit situation, it's gonna have a really strong impact. It's gonna work in situations where you have strong, directional lighting. That means, in a room like the room that we're in right now, we have lots of different lights. They have like a dozen different lights up above us, and lights coming from all over. It's not gonna have much impact in most rooms, but outside there's usually one significant light source, that being the sun. When you have strong, significant light sources, you're gonna have a good impact. Here we are again. Notice where the sun is coming from. Ninety degrees over to the right-hand side, and look at what it does to that blue sky. Here's probably the biggest change that I saw. This is down at Monument Valley. Side-lit situation again. Look at that blue sky come out. This is not Photoshop. This is just putting a polarizer on the camera. If you don't like it. You think it's too much. You can just dial it back a little bit. That's kind of the nice thing. You can go seamlessly back and forth between these two. I spent the last few years collecting as many examples as possible. Hey, I can do it, one with on, one with off. This is good for you to do, too, just because it reminds you of how much impact it has. People always get kind of mixed up. "Where do I need to be and where is the sun?" Well, you basically look towards the sun, and then turn 90 degrees, and that's where you're gonna get the most impact from a polarizer. Now, what happens if you don't follow this rule? Well, you get a photo like this. The sun is off to the right-hand side, and we're getting maximum polarizing over on the left-hand side of the screen. We used a wide-angle lens here, which means we've polarized the left part of the sky, but not the right part of the sky, because that's pointed over towards the sun here. This is a poor use of a polarizer. Some would call it an unacceptable photograph. Okay, it's not a good use. The polarizer should not have been used here, because it only darkened a portion of the sky, and that's not very realistic looking. The choices here would be to not use a polarizer, to turn the camera more to the left, or maybe just shoot a vertical image over here on the left side, and not shoot that one over on the right side. It may limit the direction that you're pointed at. Had a great morning in Morocco not too long ago. Notice where the light's coming from. From the side. Let's go ahead and add a polarizer. Notice how much more detail and contrast we can see in the sky with those clouds now. Those side-lit situations is where we get a lot of impact from this. You can use it in the forest as well, because light's coming from straight above, and it's very directional lighting. It's gonna reduce reflections. It's gonna increase the saturation, and it's gonna increase the blue in the sky. Do you want to leave it on your lens all the time? No, you don't. Problem is that it steals about 2-stops of light. It's something you would generally not be using inside. I could see potentially using one inside a museum that allowed you to use a tripod, and you were trying to shoot through a glass case, perhaps. I would see that as an exception inside. Depending on your angle of view, that may be where it's at. For me, it's very much an outdoor filter. With the polarizer, you put it on the front. It's a nice, thick filter in many cases, but you do have to be concerned about that if you are using a wide-angle lens. There are options for thinner polarizers. If you are using an ultra-wide lens, a lens that gets down 20 millimeters or wider, maybe even a 24, you may want to look at getting a slim polarizer, which is a little bit less thick. Typically, what they do is they don't have threads in the outside of this for lens caps. If you get a thick one, you can put a lens cap right on the front of it. If it's a thin one, you're gonna have to use a slip-over cover, or it won't have a cap available for it. This is to prevent vignetting, so as you're looking out the corners of your lens, you're not seeing the filter on there. If you do use a UV filter, I highly recommend taking off the UV filter, and using the polarizer. It is unwise to unnecessarily stack filters. Now, I often use UV filters, so what I'll do when it's time to go out in a situation where polarizers are going to be advantageous, is I will take off the UV filter, take out the polarizer, and they just switch positions. I got a place to put the UV, because it goes right in where the polarizer was. It's a very easy swap, and there's a place for it. It's very easy to work with in that regard. If you get a big lens, that'd be a really expensive filter if you had to get a really big filter on the front. Like a 300 2A, there are drop-in filters that you can put in towards the back of the lens. They're actually fairly small, and they should be much cheaper than they're all, but they're all specially designed and machined to fit in there properly. That's the easiest type of filter, because you don't have to worry about going out in front. It doesn't get in the way of the lens hood or anything else. That's something that you'll see on the lenses that are typically 300 millimeters and up.