Sunday, May 27, 2012

New Lens and Hitech Filters

Salam and hi everybody,

For those who don't know, I sold three of my lenses to buy this lens :


It is Nikkor 16-35mm f/4G ED VR. The main purpose that I have when decided to buy this lens is that I found that in creative landscape photography, it is important to use various type of filters. My former ultra wide angle lens (UWA) which is Samyang 14mm f/2.8 AE ED UMC was a good lens, but sadly it can't be fitted with filter due to its bulge, converging front element  nature. Plus with this new lens I have advantages of autofocusing and also be able to zoom up to 35mm.

Back to the filters, for the beginning I bought three filters which are two graduated ND and one ND filters.

- Reverse ND Grad0.9 
- GND0.6 Soft.
- ND1.2

 All of them are made by Formatt Hitech based in UK. For sure if I have lotsa money I will opted for Lee filters or Tiffen glasses, but that's not the case for now.

Talking about quality, they are all great. I used GND0.6 for most of my shots and sometimes use Reverse ND Grad for sunset/sunrise shots. Below are some of the pictures taken using these filters.

Single Exposure | Sunset at Waitoetoe Park


After Raining


Sunset From Fitzherbert Bridge


Sunset over Waitoetoe Park


Awatea Reserve


Round Culvert



Apart from all of these good pictures I captured with these filters, there are also some imperfections I found. One of them is the color cast. I found that when I stacked two filters for long exposure, there is a purple/magenta cast in the images captured. 

Color Cast


But still though, it is not really a big issue. There are two solutions for this problem which are:

1) Shoot in RAW and during the conversion to JPEG, tweak the white balance using dropper tool in Adobe Camera RAW (or set grey point in Nikon Capture NX2).

2) Make a preset white balance at the scene using a sheet of white paper.

That's all for now. Thanks for your time.


1 comment:

saye kerink said...

cantik magenta tuu! semua gambar yg u took cantik. sangat sangat! ;]