What is a neutral density filter?
Saturday, May 28, 2011
A neutral density (ND) filter is a piece of glass that fits over the front end of a lens to reduce the amount of light entering the camera. Now, you might be asking yourself when and why would anyone would ever want to do this? These filters are commonly used when shooting time lapse videos in bright daylight conditions. If it's the middle of the day and you want to capture a nice shallow depth of field you'll need to have the aperture wide open. Also if you're looking to get some motion blur as your subjects move around the frame you'll need a lower shutterspeed. Both of those settings can be hard to properly adjust for in bright daylight conditions. That's where ND filters come into play. Let's check out the explanation below by Olivia Speranza to get a better handle on all this.
Sounds pretty simple right? You're just reducing the amount of light to get a shallower depth of field and/or to blur the motion you're capturing in bright lighting conditions. ND filters are typically sold in varying degrees of darkness from about 1 level of f-stop reduction to all the way up to 13 or darker. There are some special and more expensive kinds called variable ND filters which allow you to simply rotate the filter to adjust the amount of light filtering. Here's a picture of one to give you an idea.
When purchasing your filters make sure your lens has a thread on the end that can support the addition of a filter. If it doesn't, you can get a special ring adaptor to mount the filter.
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Sounds pretty simple right? You're just reducing the amount of light to get a shallower depth of field and/or to blur the motion you're capturing in bright lighting conditions. ND filters are typically sold in varying degrees of darkness from about 1 level of f-stop reduction to all the way up to 13 or darker. There are some special and more expensive kinds called variable ND filters which allow you to simply rotate the filter to adjust the amount of light filtering. Here's a picture of one to give you an idea.
When purchasing your filters make sure your lens has a thread on the end that can support the addition of a filter. If it doesn't, you can get a special ring adaptor to mount the filter.
[get this widget]
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