Apogee Photo Magazine: Photo Filters by Nancy Rotenberg

Excerpted from "How to Photograph Close-ups in Nature"
by Nancy Rotenberg & Michael Lustbader

Filters change the appearance of light by eliminating some colors and enhancing others, in varying degrees. Buy the best quality filters that you can afford and avoid the inexpensive ones sold in package deals by some camera retail stores.

Polarizing Filters

Polarizing filters are used to remove reflections from nonmetallic materials, such as water and glass, and to darken skies to accentuate clouds. In close-up photography, polarizing filters are used to increase the apparent saturation of colors and to decrease contrast by eliminating specular reflections and highlights (small reflections from shiny or irregular surfaces).

With a polarizing filter, there is a loss of light between one-half and two and a half stops, depending on the degree of polarization. This is compensated for by your camera’s meter.

The best polarizers have a thin profile and are made from anodized brass, which have less of a tendency to bind during operation. The thin profile helps to prevent vignetting-the darkening or cutting off of corners-especially if you are using two or more filters or a wide-angle lens.


Starfish in tidepool. The left starfish was photographed without a polarizer. A circular polarizer set at full polarization was used in the right image.

Warming Filters

If you shoot in shade or in early morning, you may notice that the light tends to have a slightly cool, or bluish, cast. You can compensate for this color shift and restore a more natural-looking color balance by using the Wratten 81 series of filters (81A, 81B, 81C, from weakest to strongest) to absorb blue light in various degrees.

This effectively exaggerates the warmer tones: red, orange, yellow, and brown. In autumn, using warming filters will enhance the colors of foliage close-ups.

Sand dollars
The image on the left was taken with Ektachrome E100S, and exhibits a fairly neutral palette. For the second image, an 81A warming filter was added. Which is “better” is a matter of personal taste.

Stacking Filters

On some occasions, a polarizer and a warming filter may be stacked together and used simultaneously. It is important that both filters be clean and of the highest optical quality. Use your depth-of-field preview button, and watch for vignetting or flare.

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