I purchased a Freewell, five filter M2 filter kit. I get bad vignetting when I add two filters to the front of my lens, a CPL and a ten stop. The lens is a Canon 24-105 f/4L. I have no other filters on the front of my lens. A gentleman at Freewell said it was not the fault of the filters, but was the fault of my lens. Is this right. Has anyone else had this problem. I have a 100mm Wine Country Camera filter holder, purchased the Freewell filters, so it would be faster than the 100mm filter holder.
I'd hardly call it a fault of the lens. If you are planning to use more than one filter (~3mm) they need to be significantly wider than the filter thread. Are they 100mm squares or something else?
They are round magnetic filters that you are supposed to stack. But apparently you will have problems if you want to actually stack them like they say on their web site. Not good.
Sticky72 wrote:
They are round magnetic filters that you are supposed to stack. But apparently you will have problems if you want to actually stack them like they say on their web site. Not good.
Depends on the lens. Wide angle lenses are more susceptible to vignetting than normal or tele lenses.
Sticky72 wrote:
They are round magnetic filters that you are supposed to stack. But apparently you will have problems if you want to actually stack them like they say on their web site. Not good.
It depends a lot on the lens you use and even the focal length. A question: do you see the same vignetting at the longer focal lengths with this combo that you see with shorter focal lengths?
The best option is to use rectangular filters like 100mm size.
A quick and dirty option for same-sized circular filters (e.g., 77mm) is to use a lens that goes wider than what you need, so a 15-35 or something like that zoomed in enough to avoid the hard vignetting.
I don't use or know about this brand of filter, but back in the day if you were going to stack filters (especially on wide lenses) you would get thinner filters so to minimize the total depth when stacking them.
Thank you everyone, I have a Wine Country Camera 100mm filter holder, which I was using, purchased the Freewell filters because I thought they would be easier to carry and use.
People that buy stackable magnetic filters generally buy a filter size that is larger than the largest filter size lens. For example, if the largest filter diameter of your lenses is 77mm, you would look at filters that are at least 82mm. This can eliminate vignetting in wide angle lenses, reportedly down to 15mm or even 14mm, when stacking two filters. Of course, you can't use your lens hood in this case. 82mm is a popular filter diameter for magnetic filter vendors (e.g., Kase Revolution, NiSi JetMag, etc.).
If you stack filters on a wide angle lens, you're apt to get vignetting. It is a lens problem, e.i, too wide to stack. Thin filters might help, but as others have suggested, get larger diameter filters with step-up rings.
Frewell used to offer dark CPLs (ND+CPL) in their original magnetic filter offering. They moved away from that, but it meant there were less issues around risk of vignetting.
There are other magnetic filter vendors who give dark CPL options.
