Lens filters

Can anyone give any advice on the best use of lens filters? Last year on holiday I sometimes used a Hoya 81B and polarizer on my 24mm lens at the same time and it caused vignetting at the corners of my pictures. I’m now thinking of buying a Cokin system to avoid this happening again, but it would need to cover lenses with filter sizes from 49mm to 67mm. Would this solve the vignetting problem, and could I use a screw-in polarizer at the same time as Cokin filters? And how durable are Cokins? Hoyas last for years, but being made of glass makes them fairly scratch-resistant.

Hello guest. Sorry I can't help you on this, but that's because you are me before I logged in.

Hi,
Vignetting is always going to be a problem with wide angles and I wouldn't recomend using a screw in with the cokin on a 24mm. Althought the filters are big, the holder tend to restrict the angle in the same wasy as a screw-in. One solution might br to use the cokin polarizer as well as the correction filter. The filter holders I have do allow the use of 2 filters. The Cokin pol filter is glass so fairly robust but the plastic ones are easily scratched. Another problem is that they are not coated in the same way as glass filters and so are much more prone to flare. I have found the Cokin system cheap and fun to play with but I always try to use glass filters for serious work. The one exception to this is the grads because the system is that much more flexible. Why not try a couple to find out. Most camera shops these days seem to have a box full of second hand Cokin bits at cheap prices. The filters may have the odd mark but at least you can try it for just a few pounds and if you like it can play full wack for the filters you need.

Regards
Kim

And, of course, go for the Pro series. They are much bigger, and therefore less likely to cause vignetting.
Cokin's are pretty good if you take care of them and don't shoot in flare-prone situations, as Kim said.

I would avoid using a polariser on lenses wider than 24mm because of the uneven polarisation that you get with the large sweeps of sky - it can even cause bands of different coloured sky.

As you go wider still, the natural vignetting of an ultra wide causes darkening at the corners of the picture, which is very nice for accentuating skies without any further intervention. The 15mm is particularly useful for this effect. Sometimes, lens "defects" can be quite useful!

While at the local photo shop I was recently poking through a collection of unsorted used filters. In the collection. there were a number of very thin screw- in filters (appears to be about half the thickness of the "normal" filter) which I coincidently just learned were specifically designed for use with the wider angle lenses to stop vignetting. I do not recall which makes were there, but I understand thin line filters are usually offered, but may not be on the display rack and may be an "ordered in" item. For regular use, they look very fragile.