Fun with Filters

A friend of mine asked me to write an article about digital photography filters. At first, my thoughts were that they weren't needed for digital cameras as they are for film cameras. In most cases, I still believe this is true but after doing some pretty decent research on it, some of the filters they provide do enhance photography for digital pictures.

Now we all know the power of photo editors today. They provide endless amounts of alterations for any of your photos, yes, even the blurry ones! Think about this though; what about the initial photo that you wanted to capture in a specific way? What if you took the picture with your digital camera and there was glare or certain sections of your scene were darker? Well, with editing you could always alter that sections brightness/contrast, color spectrum or more but all that sometimes takes a considerable amount of time to make it blend with the entire photo and look unmodified.

This is where the use of digital lenses come in! Applying one of these to you current lens would alleviate the need to modify anything. There are a few that are recommended for use and they're listed in these resource links below for further information. I'll be exploring some of these myself soon. I'm especially interested in the polarizing and UV filter lenses.

Also, remember if you've made changes to your camera's configuration to accomodate for some internal camera filtering, know where you left your previous settings. If you've had them configured manually for a specific scene and forgot what they were and just go out and shoot your next scene, you'll run into major issues! So, along with exploring your filters, ALWAYS 'reset' your digital camera to normal default shooting settings. Most digitals have an 'auto' mode or a mode that will allow for general use.

Filter Reference links:
Photo.Net
Digital Photography For What Its Worth
Nature Photographers
Adorama.Com (shows you with a picture what the filters do)