UKC

Could anybody recommend some middle-of-the-road ND filters for a 58mm lens?

I'm not after anything ridiculously cheap or astronomically expensive. I'm after the Goldilocks of ND filters please.

In reply to The Lemming:

Nd filters or grey grads which ones are you after.

In reply to john1963:

Mostly ND, however one day I'd like to play with a graduated filter but I don't think I'll need them just yet.

In reply to The Lemming:

I use kood filters mostly there excellent for the price. Personally I wouldn't buy an nd filter over six stops unless it was one of the expensive makes eg Lee 's big stopper. There generally terrible.

I use a Hoya 3 stop and 10 stop and they give a bit of a blue cast but are otherwise pretty decent for the price. The cast is easily adjusted for in Lightroom.

In reply to The Lemming:

is this for stills or video?
if for the later, are you comfortable colour grading in your editor?

In reply to rallymania:



Hmm. On this occasion its mostly video. Sadly I don't think that Premier Elements is up to the job of correcting colour but I don't want to shell out for the professional version. Also, its way, way too complicated for my little brain.

In reply to The Lemming:

Don't do much video but interested to know why you would need them for video.

In reply to john1963:

Wide open aperture for shallow depth of field, just like with normal photography.

In reply to The Lemming:

does it give you the option to change white balance in elements? it's probably a "safe" assumption that all footage shot with the ND filter on will have the same colour cast (assuming the same white balance setting for each clip) so you may be able to just tweak the white balance to "fix" it

I've only used an older version of premier pro so i'm not sure how elements "looks" but does it have any effects? are any of them called something like fast color correction or 3 way color corrector?

In reply to john1963:
there's a concept in movie / video production where your shutter speed is twice your frame rate. so it you are shooting at 25fps you'd have your shutter speed at 1/50 of a second... that's open for quite a long time (relatively speaking) for day light so if you'd either have to stop down or wack an ND filter on.

(edited to add)
*or bang the frame rate up* to make your shutter speed higher

In reply to rallymania:

Even though Premier Elements is a striped down version of the Big Boy version, quite a lot of features are still way above my skill level.

I've only just worked out how to sharpen stuff from my new camera which has sharpening as low as possible at capture.

In reply to The Lemming:

i just worked my way through a course from "creative cow" on youtube.

don't know what version you have, but i suspect the basics are the same for most versions.

youtube.com/watch?v=YwGdKtvz9hQ&

although it's specifically talking about protune from a gopro, the point of the video is color correction... hope that points you in the right direction.
doesn't answer your question about ND filters of course, sorry. i just use a fairly basic set at the moment. they are rubbish quality but good enough for what i need at the moment

In reply to rallymania:

That was really useful.

Cheers