Cokin FLW-FLD

[Bronnie]

Morning

Does anybody have experience or comments using these filters?

Cokin says 'correctors of fluorescent light' = remove greenish casts.

I am going Italy - will be in Rome - doing some night photos - large monuments - lit up.

Will these filters be useful?
I don't mind buying them to experiment with.

Would prefer not having to do much work with software to remove casts etc (I'm not up to scratch with PS just yet)

Using Canon 40D.


thanks
Bronnie

[ricktas]

Hey Bronnie,

These filters were extremely helpful when shooting with film. Film was generally produced for daylight, and if you were under a different light, your photos would have a colourcast when developed. So to eliminate that we used filters like those you mention

Digital has helped us do away with those filters. Your digital camera has White Balance. If you leave your digital camera on Auto White Balance, it will perform a check of the light in any given situation and adjust its settings accordingly, to allow you to produce whites that look white. So in short, you do not need to spend money buying the above filters.

Have a read of your manual's white balance information to gain an understanding of how you can adjust the white balance for given situations, but generally the Auto setting does a damn fine job of correcting any colour casts in your scene.

Fluorescent tubes produce an interesting almost alien green on film, the human eye doesnt notice it cause our eyes correct for it automatically (like White balance).

You night monuments will come up just fine, but are you shooting in JPG or RAW? RAW lets you alter the white balance on your PC, so even if your camera does get it wrong, you can fix it.

[Bronnie]

Ah - film.

Auto White Balance - yup, seems I got a bit more reading to do.
Shooting in RAW.
Have Aperture to do some adjustments.

thanks for the quick reply.

Bronnie

[jjphoto]

Rule #1, always shoot RAW.
Rule #2, never forget Rule #1.
If in doubt, refer to Rule #1.

JJ

[arthurking83]

LOL! JJ :D

if you shoot jpg, then try to have as part of a routine, a system where you make sure all camera settings are appropriately configured, and probably the most important is WB(and possibly any camera enhancement you care for.

as JJ implies though....refer to rule #1

[bigdazzler]

Auto White Balance - yup, seems I got a bit more reading to do.
Shooting in RAW.
Have Aperture to do some adjustments.

As well as AWB your camera will have WB presets, such as Daylight, Cloudy, Shady, Tungsten (this is handy when shooting under normal household lightbulbs with that yellowy/orange cast), Flourescent .. you can use your initiative ans switch to one of these if you feel you need to to match the light in your scene .. theyre not perfect but they do a pretty good job of adjusting the colour temperature accordingly .. If you do change your preset and take it off AWB, try and get into the habit of changing it back to AWB at the end of the day. Its easy to forget and the next time you shoot, your pictures can end up way out.

You should shoot in RAW because any unwanted colour casts you can fix in Aperture using the white balance/color temp slider

Be aware though, that if you do choose to shoot all your pictures in RAW, they are much larger files than even JPG fines and youll fill your cards up much quicker .. :)