Lens filters and their purposes?

Question

Can anyone tell me what a UV, polarizing, or neutral density filter does for your images? I looked it up and just saw websites that were selling them. And does anyone know of any other filters or are there only 4 (i know of the macro/close-up filter)? Thanks :)

Answer 1

UV Protects your lens.

Polarizing can be used to reduce shine of objects and make the sky a deeper blue.

ND (Neutral Density) can be used to make distant objects properly exposed. (So they don't look like trees and mountain when you look around from a tower or something and you see they look grey and blue.

Answer 2

A UV Filter helps reduce haziness or fogginess created by ultraviolet (UV) lights. Polarizing filters are used in black-and-white and color  photography  for  the  following  reasons: 1.   Reduction   or   elimination   of   unwanted reflections (glare) from nonmetallic surfaces, such as glass and water 2. Exposure control, similar to ND filters 3. Reducing the effects of haze 4.  Darkening  the  blue-sky  image  in  both  black- and-white  and  color  photography 5.   Increasing color saturation in a color photograph without  altering  the  hues  of  image  colors.  And An ideal neutral density filter reduces light of all wavelengths or colors equally. The purpose of standard photographic neutral density filters is to allow the photographer greater flexibility to change the aperture or exposure time, allowing for more control, particularly in extreme circumstances.

Hope this helps

Answer 3

A Haze/UV filter eliminates atmospheric haze and, more importantly, protects the front element of your lens from dust, atmospheric pollution and smudges/fingerprints. One should be on every lens you own.

A Skylight filter (1A, uncoated or 1B, coated) will remove the bluish tint seen in shaded areas and in snow in shadow.

A circular polarizer darkens a blue sky, making white puffy clouds really "pop". It also removes glare and/or reflections from glass, snow, water, sand and painted metal - but not polished metal.

A Neutral Density (ND) filter is used in very bright sunlight when the combination of the smallest f-stop (f16, f22) and lowest ISO (50, 80, 100) will not give a slow enough shutter speed to blur moving water or any other reason a slow shutter speed might be desired.

Never, never, never buy cheap, no-name filters. Choose from Heliopan, B+W, Singh-Ray, Tiffen or Hoya. I still use a Tiffen polarizer bought in 1972.

Answer 4

Hi Diana,

Since you have great answers to the four filters you were specifically asking about,  I will address the second part of your question...  Are there others?

Along with the UV filter,  there is the Haze and the Skylight filter used for about the same purpose.

Yes there are many other filters for various effects.  

Criss/Cross filters add star-like point effects when shooting lights or water.

Fog filters make your pictures like you shot them on a very foggy day.

Diffusion filters soften the picture and to varying degrees depending on the intensity of the diffusion.

Graduating filters making colors go from very satuarated to natural.  They come in all colors and also in the neutral density filters.

Multiple Image filters put several identical images in the picture.   There are many varieties of this filter for tons of unusual effects.

Colored filters for use with black and white images to inhance contrast.  These come in various shades of red / green / yellow / blue.

Conversion filters which act as white balancers for correcting lighting issues.

Spot filters, which have a small disc shaped hole in the middle to accentuate the very center of an image, with the rest of the image highly blurred.

And there are others... but that is a few for you to look into if you are interested.   These are the filters that I have in my collection.  They are fun to use in the right shooting situation.

Thanks for reading :))