Good to see you doing some in-depth research Tom. Clearly you have found a way to achieve the desired results while saving a lot of photographers a good deal of money. Excellent efforts and thanks for sharing
Saw all the hoopla yesterday while reading.... so when I shot a basketball game last night I stopped and spent a whopping $1 ona package of 200 filters to try out. I just stuffed three of them into the end of my 70-200 lens hood and took the shot to calibrate........
It didn't come out too bad..... I may try only two next time... here's a shot I did nothing to except a slight crop and noise reduction without any color correction.
Hi Tony -- Those whites look pretty white on my monitor!
The nice thing about the coffee filters over the respirator filter is ease of attaching to the lens -- with the coffee filters you can just hold them in place over the front of your lens without needing any special adapters -- I like that. Plus, at .03 each you can afford to keep a few spares on-hand in case they get trashed
When I first saw the Expodisc I thought about this, what you have done.
Several years ago when I would night wakeboard we put 4x4 spotlight on my boat, in order to widen the beam I bought some acrylic light diffusor material and put it over the lenses of the lights. Worked like a dream.
I think I am hoinh to have to make a home depot run myself.
Is there a general consesus on best meterial yet? Coffee or Resporator?
Linda Baldwin wrote:
When you use the acrylic sheet material, do you *replace* the glass in the filter with it?
Thanks,
Linda
Linda , because of the thickness of the Pad I had to use a polarizer filter and replace it with a piece of UV glass , so you have UV towards the lens then the pad then the sheet material and then screw the lens ring back in place.
geir wrote:
How well does this work as an expo disc though. Any results you can share with us ?
Basically, is it worth making, or are you doing it because you are having fun...
Geir , Maybe this will help,
Jack Flesher wrote:
Great find Tom!
For all you measurebators that are leery of these types of things, I just spent a few minutes digging around in my garage and low and behold, found my paint respirator pre-filters So being leery myself, I got out my trusty Sekonic 558 combo meter and metered an overhead light from 3 feet with the dome on the meter -- 1/15th @ f4.3 ISO 100. I then switched to spot and metered through the respirator at 3 feet -- 1/15th @ f4.5. This makes my pre-filters within 1/3 stop of neutral gray in transmission -- way close enough for WB. So the question remains as to how neutral in color are they really? I don't have a color meter, but as soon as the sun is up tomorrow, I will compare the filter to the gray card, though I suspect it is very close to a true neutral.
I just made one tonight and did a bit of testing, nothing scientific mind you.
I liberated 3 coffee filters from the corner gas station and dismantled a crappy Polarizing filter. I tested with 2 and 3 filter elements and find the I like the color using 2 better than three.
I went to home depot and they did not have round resporator filters there and the ones they did have appeared to have a blueish tint.
