On 11/6/05, bill latham <to_gishi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The filters were yellow,
> green and haze (I'm ignorant on filter use, so why
> those colors?). It also has a very nice fitted al case
> with a govt. id plate.
Just thought I'd reply about the filters; they're for B&W photography.
The quick rule of thumb version is that a yellow filter is a good
general purpose B&W filter (some would argue that you should always
use it for B&W unless you're using a different filter for a specific
effect) whereas a green filter is really good for working with
foliage. Personally though, I think it's better to understand exactly
what the filters are doing so that you get a better understanding of
when and why you would use them. For that read on.
B&W film only picks up the tonal values of the scene (is something
light or dark) and not the colour (obviously). In colour you can have
2 objects the same tone (brightness) but different colours and still
see a clear distinction between the 2 objects. In B&W you lose that
distinction by colour and the 2 objects end up being the same grey
tone. A common example is the sky. Depending on the time of day, the
sky is often light blue. The white clouds in the sky are clearly
defined in colour because they aren't blue. But, they happen to be
very similar in tone. Because of this, you often get skies that turn
out as a single expanse of white (or near white) and the clouds don't
show up very well (if at all).
You can adjust for this by using different coloured filters. Most
explanations of how this works go into explaning how light is broken
up into red, green and blue and the colour wheel. If you're not too
familiar with colour theory that gets kind of confusing. The easiest
way to look at it is that the filter turns the whole scene into being
the colour of the filter or not being the colour of the filter. For
example, if you put a green filter on then your scene is now broken
down into levels of "green" and "not green". Anything that's green
will show up light and anything not green will be darker. In the sky
example above, the common fix is to use a yellow filter. The blue sky
is not yellow so it will come out darker, the clouds are white (which
contains all colours of light) so they will remain light. A more
extreme effect can be had by using a red filter which will make the
sky almost black while keeping the clouds bright white.
The most common filters you run across are yellow, green and red.
There are variations though such as yellow-green and orange. Usually,
the yellow filter isn't as strong a filter as green or red so you
don't get as much of an effect from using it.
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