Hello I'm Graham and I hope everyone's having a great day and welcome to the
fifth part of this new series I'm running for new users to the Panasonic
Lumix FZ300/330 camera now. In today's video we're going
to be looking at the use of filters and close-up lenses with the camera. It's a
question I get quite often on my Photographic blog, the choice of
filters, which type to use, which situations would use the filters and for
close-up lenses which would be my recommendations for the type of filter
for macro and close at work. Let's begin by looking at probably one of the most
controversial filters - and that's that UV filter. Now the UV filter has its origins
back in the days of film. Film emulsion has a high sensitivity to UV light and
if you shooting landscapes for example you may notice that the distant hills
would turn blue because of the amount of ultraviolet and the water vapour so we
used a UV filter which would eliminate that blue cast to the image. But with
modern digital camera sensors, the sensor itself has both infrared and ultraviolet
absorption layers in front of it so there's absolutely no reason to fit UV
filters to the camera. Now this is where the controversy comes in some people say
that it's a good idea to fit these to protect the front element of the lens
and other people say no, if you do that you're going to degrade the image
quality and you lose a low contrast and you're not actually going to protect the
lens at all. Now I'm of the school that says only fit the filter in an adverse
situation - such as if you're at the seaside and you've got the chance of
salt spray contacting the lens or you perhaps at Motorsports where there's a
chance of flying debris coming hitting the lens but in normal circumstances I
would recommend that you don't fit the UV filter. If you are fitting the filter
make sure the camera lens is scrupulously clean before you fit it and make sure
you clean both the front and back surface of the filter otherwise when
you're in the wide-angle mode you might even see dust on the front surface of
this lens. When you're in that wide-angle position especially if you're shooting
towards the light the camera with his closed focus ability will show you that
dust on the film on the front of the lens. The best form of protection is in fact a lens hood and the number of people I see
carrying cameras around that don't use a lens and it's amazing it's there to
provide both the functionality of protecting the front surface of the lens
and to shade the lens from stray light. So once the lens hoods installed you're
not likely to impact the front face of the lens and in most cases it's going to
shield the light from hitting the camera lens giving you ghosting and flaring and
loss of contrast - so always use your lens hood - It's there for that purpose. If you
are going to fit the UV filter I say clean front and back surfaces screw it
onto the lens and then replace your lens hood. It's not a good idea to stack
filters so if you're going to use say the circular polarizing filter -we're going
to talk about next - you must remove the UV filter before you fit the circular
polarizing filter otherwise you're introducing too many glass to air
elements and the risk of ghosting and flaring the loss of contrast is even
more severe. So let's now look at the circular polarizing filter. Now the
circular polarizing filter is there to reduce reflections in natural light. It
doesn't work in artificial light so it's no use trying to use them indoors to
take reflections off pictures and mirrors etc it won't work but if you're
in natural light outdoors it can reduce the reflection. But there is a caveat as
well - it only works when the light is between 90 degrees and say 45 degrees to
the camera axis. If the sun is back over your shoulder and you're trying to
photograph something you won't see any reduction in reflections at all. Here's a
demonstration clip that I shot. The light is directly over my shoulder and I'm
rotating this circular polarizing filter through 360 degrees and you notice
there's no reduction in that reflection on the leaves. Turn to another situation
where the light is now coming at 45 degrees or between 45 and 90 degrees to
the camera and you can see that as I rotate the filter I can totally
eliminate those reflections from the leaves or the water behind in that case.
So you can see when the light is at 45 or 90 degrees to camera I can totally
reduce those reflections from the leaves or
shooting water you can see that I can reduce most of those reflections from
the water. So the circular polarizing filter screws into the front element of
the lens and then you can rotate it while you're looking through the
viewfinder to see when that cut point appears. Now it's probably impossible to
fit the circular polarizing filter and the lens hood at simultaneously because
you need to get your hands inside to adjust that front rotating ring. So once
that's in there "A" you can't install the lens at afterwards and if you install
the lens hood and then try and install the filter you see you can't get your
fingers in there to adjust the front element so it is a situation where
you're going to be using the camera without the lens hood. So again the
chances of ghosting or flaring because of light striking those glass surfaces
is very much increased. Don't be tempted to try the linear polarizing filter
which again has its origins in the film days. Linear polarizing filter may upset
the way that the camera autofocuses so always choose the circular polarizing
filter for your polarizing needs. Now let's look at another variant to the
circular polarizing filter and it's the neutral density filter. Well the neutral
density filter comes in two varieties one is the variable type and this one is
a variable ND filter. It's basically two polarizing filters - one is fixed and one
rotates and by overlapping the cut angle of each other filters you can actually
totally eliminate the light coming into the camera. Again there's a problem with
that - as you start to go to the maximum densities you do see a colour shift
appearing or in some severe cases you'll see an X appear on the image where the
two polarizing faces cross over. So you can only use them from the minimum to
about three-quarters of the ability to reduce light - but they're useful
especially in video to get you the correct frame rate but I'll talk about
that when we do the video section of this tutorial.
The other filters are the fixed neutral density and this one is the
Hoya Pro ND 200 which is an 8 F-stop filter so that reduces the amount of
light reaching the sense of by a factor of 8 f-stops so it's ideal for shooting
things like running water where you want to create those soft dreamy flowing
water scenes or if you're a seaside you wanted to create a very still looking sea.
Long time exposures are created by using the neutral density filter. If you wanted
further light reduction you could use the Hoya Pro ND 1000 and the Hoya ND
1000 is a 10 stop reduction in light so where the Pro ND 200 is effectively eight
stops reduction the Pro ND 1000 is 10 stops - so it gives you an extra two stops
of light reduction if you wanted to create super long time exposures - so the
reason for these is to extend your shutter time to give you those long time
exposures. With some of these filters there's also the possibility of a colour
balance change especially if you use in the darker filters say the ND 8. You'll
find that you get a colour shift normally towards a green or some cases towards
the magenta dependant on the dye set that's been used with the filter. So it's
worth buying a good filter for both optical quality so you don't get any
reduction in optical quality and "B" the color balance stay neutral as you
use the ND filter. You can of course use a manual white balance to try and reduce
that it may help in some circumstances, I've used the welding filter which is
about 10 stops and again by using manual white balance I was able to get a
neutral picture by using that manual white balance setup in the camera.
Now a variation of the neutral density filter is the use of what are called
graduated neutral density filters. Now to use those you need the adapter to go
with your camera so that goes from the 52 millimeter thread to the 100
millimeter square filter holder. Most of this operation you could do in
post-processing. If you use neutral density filter in something like
Photoshop or Lightroom you can create the same effect but if you don't want to
do any post-processing and you wanted to reduce the amount of burnout in skies
for example you can use one of these neutral
graduated filters. So they clear at the
bottom and they've gotta then a variable graduation from nothing up to a fixed
amount of density so you can slide this into the filter holder and with the
filter holder on the camera you can look through the viewfinder and see at the
point of which you starting to cut off the the amount of light in the sky. It's
ok if you've got a level horizon but sometimes if you've got mountains and
valleys you notice that the graduation darkens the mountains and it looks
slightly artificial. So in those sort of situations is better to create a mask in
Photoshop and then reduce the sky without reducing the mountains. But these
are useful if you wanted to stack things like neutral density and fixed density
so your making long time exposures and your shading down the sky you can
use two filters slight together they're very close together so you don't get vignetting
and with a hundred millimetres frame you don't see any vignetting even
at the wide-angle setting. So if you really want to improve your landscape
photography you might want to consider using the hundred millimeter square
filter holders instead of the circle ones. Now let's look at close-up lenses.
Some people refer to them as close-up filters because it actually 52
millimeter threaded and this screw onto the front of the camera so hence the
name close-up filter. With close-up lenses there are two notation systems -
one is the diopter and your probably gets sets of number one number two number
and some systems even include a number ten which is quite a high magnification and
other systems use the "D" designation. So in fact this one here is the polaroid
250D and that gives a four times magnification so there is a number 500
which gives you two times magnification but the 250D is the one I normally use
as that gives me a nice magnification ratio and a suitable working distance to
my subjects. Now there are two types of lenses one is the single element lens
and the other is called an achromatic lens.
Now the achromatic lens is actually two lenses or three lenses bonded together
to reduce some of these defects that you get with a single element lens - with a
single element lens you get distortion around the outside edge
and sometimes you get what's called colour fringing or chromatic aberration where
the lens can't focus the three colors of red green blue to the same focus point
so you end up with color fringes so it's best if you are going to get into
close-up photography to choose what first of all an achromatic lens so this
is a sigma a chromatic lens quite an old lens but still a very good sharp
close-up lenses. They're very difficult to find now so the hence the reason for
choosing the Polaroid 250d lens as a substitute for it again that's an
achromatic lens 52 millimeters and it screws into the front of the camera and
gives me that four times magnification
Another system is the Raynox system And the Raynox system comes with its
own mount system so the Raynox has a adapter which will fit most cameras from
52 millimeters up to 62 millimetres and it just simply clips into the lens
thread of the camera and then you screw the particular lens that you want into
their adapter. Now that is fine it works well but there is a possibility that you
might just catch the tub and push it off and also if you don't get it on square
you could end up with a part of your image being in focus and the other not
so I tend to not use the supplied adapter but you step up rings from the
43 millimeters that the lens has up to 52 millimeters I've adapted from 43 up
to 52 and then that screws on to the front of the camera like so - and that
keeps the lens nice and optically centered and it's parallel to the film
plane so you don't get any shift in focus or optical shift in the axis as you
screw the lens on. Again they're available in two strengths the 150 and
the 250 if you're a new user to macro photography that 150 is much easier to
use than to 250 and it gives you a little bit more depth of field so if you
are struggling to get depth of field in macro shots and you don't want to use
stacking technologies to produce multiple images and stack them
to one image then the 150 is a good starting lens gives you a nice working
distance to your subject and gives you a reasonable amount of magnification. Now
I'm going to put a link to a page of my blog where I set out the magnifications
and the amount of subject to camera distance that you expect to achieve on
using these close-up lenses on that chart you'll see the various focus
distances you can achieve when you've got the camera set to infinity and when
you've got it set to its closest focus point you'll see the distances you've
got the camera to the subject so dependent on the type of photography
whether you're shooting insects or flowers - you judge the amount of magnification and
the distance you need to be from those charts on that blog page. So hope you'll
go and have a look at that and decide which lens to use. In terms of optical
quality there's not a lot of difference between the Raynox and the Polaroid
system you do suffer from vignetting up to x 4 with the Raynox lens if you look
through the back of the viewfinder when you first install it you see there's a
very dark circle and you've got to zoom out to about x 4 to enable you to move
past that vignetting point if you use the 250 d you can use a camera all the
way from 24 millimetres all the way up to 600 millimetres to get the required
magnification without any vignette in from the lens itself. So hopefully that's
given you some insight introduced of filters and close-up lenses with this
camera and have a look at the photographic blog there's a lot more
information on filters and close-up lens there and I'll put links to those in
the video description below. Now the next video is going to be on shooting video
with the FZ300/330 will be quite a long program - there's a lot to talk about
recording sound with the video it's likely to be about three weeks before I
can gather ready because I'm into the middle of a very large DIY project at
home and it's going to take me about another two weeks to be able to complete
that before the weather starts to get too bad here in the UK. So hopefully I'm
going to get you that video within the next two to three weeks depending on the
weather outside etc. So until the next one thanks again for watching if you're
new viewer to the channel please check out the previous
four of the videos. There will be a playlist in YouTube so you can actually look at
the previous videos - so until the next video thanks very much for watching
please do take care and I'll see you all in the next one.
Goodbye for now.