😳 Not all glass is the same. Warning + Advice to creators who use filters.

With the popularity of filters such as black mist pros or softening filters it's crucial that photographers and videographers know exactly what effects the glass they put in front of their high end lens have and if its actually giving you the intended effect you're after.

I love me some filters. I use them frequently for my photography like a lot of photographers these days from my street to portraits and studio work. Filters like the Black Mist diffusion filter have come synonymous with a lot of my work and essential to adding that cinematic hazy look a lot of us crave. However, not all glass and not all filters from different companies are the same. Every brand has their own coating and sometimes it can be confusing with names like "black mist diffusion with softening and nano X" or "black PRO-MIST" or "Cinema diffusion filter" with varying models. I won't get into the specifics of what each different one actually does or how they differ but in general black mist filters are supposed to soften images by scattering light, reducing contrast, and adding a subtle glow or 'bloom' to highlights without significant loss of detail (remember this key point). This gives us that dreamy, cinematic look.

Here's a good breakdown:

Recently I was contacted by a brand who sells filters amongst other camera related gear and I have used some of their more experimental filters in the past with no issues. I was sent some blackmist pro filters to replace the ones I was using from other brands like K&F Concept. As I was excited to get these new filters as soon as they arrived I slapped them onto my lens and took a look through the viewfinder to see that soft effect and assumed all was good.

Boy was I wrong.

I had a cherry blossom shoot with a client about 2 hours outside of Tokyo this past week and having shot there before I was excited with the photos we were going to take. The day was looking great and the blossoms were not quite full bloom but looking quite good nonetheless. I had my Sony A7IV paired with my Tamron 70-180mm II which makes an amazing lightweight but pro level combo and I've used this combo on so many prior shoots. My confidence was high we were going to get great shots.

And we did!

The eye-auto focus was nailing focus on her eyes so I was sure they were going to look amazing. Looking at the shots on the Live View display they looked great. I was even showing her the photos on the back of the camera and she was over the moon with the shots we were getting. Time to call it a day, go home and send the clients their first draft of beautiful cherry blossoms in Japan!

Until I started to notice something once the images were on my computer in higher resolution. As I was scrolling through, I noticed that there was a strange blur in the photos across the entire image. Some sequences were not so bad while others were horrible. I looked at my settings to see if there was something off there and I was shooting within a very good range of 1/250 f 2.8 ISO 200 with a variable ND filter and the black mist filter stacked. I started to feel a sense of panic as I went through the images one by one. As I said, only some photos were completely unusable while others could work with extra attention to editing and some sharpening filters but I couldn't understand what happened. My first thought was maybe the lens had an issue.

So I did some tests at home no edits just from camera. Below were the results.

TESTS

Below is an example shot at 180mm with no filters whatsoever f3.2 1/160 ISO 200. There is a fine amount of clarity and detail in the dragon.

Below: same settings as above but using the K&F Black Diffusion Nano-D series 1/4. Notice that there is a slight softening and haze effect but there is still a lot of detail retention. This is the effect we want.

Below: Walking Way Black Mist 1/4 filter. The image is not 'soft' but a blurry mess. This is especially not desirable when shooting close up portraits which was a lot of what I was shooting on the day I used this filter.

As I mentioned before, I have used other filters from this company to great effect like their Linear Prism filter and Streak filters but this was not acceptable and I wanted to share my recent experience so other creators could avoid any damaging issues. I was fortunate that the client was available for a re-shoot and I can safely report that shoot went beautifully so crisis averted but it could have been much worst.

In the end, I take full responsibility for not testing the glass when I got it. No company is perfect and there will be defective items in every batch. Just make sure what you are getting is what you ordered and test them at home before taking them to important shoots. I told the company and provided the above examples so they are aware of the issues and will correct them I was assured.

That's all for now and I hope this can help even one fellow creator out there from the same fate. Lesson learned!

Have you had similar issues? Let me know in the comments section below.

Thanks for reading!

• d.