Filters when do you use them?

[Anonymous]

Doing research on cameras I see filters mentioned a lot. I have no clue as to what they do or what they are for can someone shine some light on this for me?

[SpencerStewart]

UV filters – block UV rays, protect camera’s lens
Polarizing – cut out glare

Those are the two basics I can think of. In addition to that there are many color filters, gradient filters, and more.

[Anonymous]

Mr Stewart is right.

Different filters do [or can give] different effects.

Colored filters can either bring out a color or reduce a color.
You have filters that can give you a soft focus effect.
Some will give you a halo effect around lights.

There are many filters that will do many things that can add to the overall look and feel of your images.

UV is maybe the 1 single you can’t go wrong with it filter.
UVs block UV light which we cannot see but its one part of the light spectrum that helps to make video look like video.
Blocking that nasty little frequency can help us reach that film look we love so much. [Of course the film look is far deeper than that but UV filters help to get you there.]

You dont really need filters but they can make your projects look better and they can help reduce some of the editing workload because its on the image and one less adjustment you need to make in post.

[Anonymous]

I once bought a blue gradient filter. It rotated, so I thought I’d use it to add blue to any skyline. The "blue-grad" worked okay but added a blue tint to everything (Clouds, trees, airplanes) in the sky. I held on to it though.

Now I use it in a new way: to balance different light on a wall. Inside my home I had sunlight coming through a window to my right, and a table lamp on my left. Both gave off light that spilled onto a white wall. To my camcorder, one side of my video was blue and the other was orange. I rotated the blue filter to make everything blu-ish, and re-whitebalanced. Ta-da!

-andrew

[Author]

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