Monochrome filters....

HBeevers

HBeevers

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Henry
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Hi,

I've got some shots back from a walk about taking landscapes on some Tmax 400, they're nice and when exposed well look great but I'm missing the ability to darken the blues in the sky like I could with digital. I understand that this can be done fairly easily with coloured filters namely; yellow, orange and red to increasing effect. My questions are:

Is a red filter going to produce just black skies? that's likely going to be too dramatic for me in which case is the effect of an orange filter generally sufficient for dramatic skies?

Is there a particular colour filter that is going to improve portraits? A number of sites suggest red for increasing luminance of blemishes but i'd be interested to hear from a more trusted source!

Thanks for any help guys!

Image attached, just because.... Tmax 400 - 135 format on my old olympus kit with ND grad.

tMRKFpn.jpg
 
a red filter will darken the blues ( quite a lot ) but if there are any clouds in the sky they will stay white , i think i'd be tempted to go for the orange more than the red. anyway the pic you've posted looks pretty good to me. as for portraits i've read somewhere that green is fairly decent ,although never used it myself ,
 
Donut has pretty much covered the advic I would give there are 3 filters Yellow for a slight darkening of blues, orange for darkening blues and lifting orange / yellow colours and the full on effect is the red filter which makes blues quite dark seems to lighted whites and lights oranges / yellow to almost white.
 
I shot these on acros 100 with a red filter...http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/some-b-ws.503761/

You can easily see just how dark really blue sky's can go, pale blue light sky's lit by the proximity of the sun or sky's with whispy clouds, mist/fog, the effect is much less.

I have to say, the pictures in the above link are ok but they've not come out exactly as I expected, I think the whites are a little over exposed cos I shot at iso 50, I've since found a red grad to be more to my liking in that I don't have to compensate for exposure as much as a full red..:)
 
Thanks for the examples, that's useful information. I'm looking at ordering a full red and a graduated orange for more conservative shots.

Any chance that anybody's used a blue filter for portraits? Apparently it can give the effect of a tintype with very bright eyes and darker skin tones (to a slightly lesser extent obviously) which could be interesting to play with!
 
I used to almost always use a yellow filter with black and white... then I tried red but found it a bit extreme. Now an orange filter lives on the lens most of the time, and I like the results. The downside is it loses more light than the yellow (but maybe a bit less than the red). Generally not too much of an issue with TTL metering, but a problem for rangefinder and viewfinder cameras, where you may have to compensate. However, b&w has great latitude so you could just ignore it, as I used to do with yellow!

I've no experience of portraits, really...
 
I think I'll have to get both a cheaper red and orange filter and then do 3 shots unfiltered, orange and red to compare. I'll just be using cheaper 7dayshop/ kood square filters so it's not bad to buy a selection to try. I'll get a blue one too and post the results of a portrait if they're interesting, though someone with blue eyes would probably look best....
 
@HBeevers ( text borrowed from someone else )

Which one should I buy?
Changes using the yellow filter are subtle so it's used by many photographers as a lens protector and most benefit is seen in landscape photography where the effect on blue is just enough to make a light sky a shade darker than the print's border.
The orange lightens reds so it's favoured by portrait photographers who use it to reduce freckles and skin blemishes. Architectural photographers also find it's affect on bricks useful. This out of all the filters is arguably the most practical and should be a definite first on your shopping list.
Red is for the creative photographer who likes contrasty results, as tones are dramatically affected. It's also used by infrared photographers as an alternative to the true infrared filter and very popular with landscape shooters.
Green is less popular in the black & white photographer's kit, but would be appreciated by landscape photographers as it affects greens and can help differentiate between foliage making the whole scene come to life. The downside is it lightens the blue in a sky so the overall contrast may suffer.
Blue is little used for black & white work and would mostly be considered as a contrast reducer which you can often do satisfactorily using a different paper grade.
 
Thanks, that's in line with what i've been reading. The blue filter seems to induce a light fog effect too, especially in landscapes. I'm still going to give it a try for a more gritty portrait though as for someone with blue eyes it would darken skin tones and really brighten the eyes which would look pretty interesting I think....
 
I use both green & orange for my studio portraiture work probably a 75/25% split in favour of green, I tend to go for green on lighter skin tones.
 
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