filter

Breakthrough Photography’s X-Series Filters are Ultra-Thin, Easy to Remove, and Affordable

Breakthrough Photography today announced a new lineup of X-Series Traction UV and ND filters that are drawing a lot more attention than your standard lens filter typically gets.

The series consists of three separate models, each of which measures in at between 3.2 and 3.5mm in depth, comes in filter sizes between 49mm and 82mm, and includes a clever ring setup that makes placing and removing the filters less of a hassle.

DIY Hack: Add a 3-Stop ND Filter to Super Curved Fisheye Lenses

The Rokinon 8mm f/2.8 lens is one of the best options for photographers wanting to get in on the super-wide-angle action with as little of an investment as possible.

One problem with this lens, however -- and it's the same with most fisheye lenses -- is the curved front element. With such a dramatic curve, the use of filters on such a lens is almost impossible... almost.

DIY: Use a Little Plastic and an Old Filter to Create Cinematic Lens Flares

As 3D printing becomes more easily accessible and cheaper to work with, more and more people are experimenting to see just how the technology can be used to improve and tweak their photography. One such tweak has been created and shared by Instructables user Jan_Henrik.

By putting together an unused filter casing and a 3D printed piece of plastic, he's able to get some extra ‘pop’ in his photos and videos in the form of cinematic JJ Abrams-like lens flares.

Litely Brings Subtle, Film-Inspired Presets to Your Mobile Photography

As Instagram goes to show, people love to give their mobile photos that extra bit of pop, to make them stand out from the rest and give them an aesthetic true to photography past. To do so, they rely on various applications, most notably VSCO Cam, which claims to be the “standard” among mobile photography applications. However, as of today, there’s a new contender: Litely.

Filter Fakers Tumblr Exposes Instagram #nofilter Fraud

There are several very popular hashtags that make their way around Instagram daily, and one of them is #nofilter. It's the hashtag that proclaims to the world that they're seeing what you saw---no ifs, ands or earlybirds.

But, of course, not everybody that uses the #nofilter hashtag is being honest, and so a Tumblr blog has been created that seeks to expose all of these 'filter fakers.'

What Your Choice of Instagram Filter Says About Your Personality

100 million users are uploading 40 million photographs on a daily basis to Instagram. Of these images, 43% of them dont have any retro filters applied to them. That leaves 22.8 million filtered photos hitting the social network every 24 hours.

Marketing firm Marketo recently poked around with some of Instagram's statistics, and then decided to assign personality profiles to some of the service's most popular filters. It's like Instagram meets Chinese Zodiac.

Google+ Quietly Rolls Out a Photos-Only Filter for Search Results

Facebook announced its photos-only news feed filter earlier this month (alongside a major News Feed revamp) at a major press event surrounded by much fanfare. Now, Google has followed suit with its Google+ social network -- albeit much, much more quietly.

The service unveiled a new photos-only feed today, but instead of holding a major press event about it, it was outed by Google engineer Dave Cohen through his Google+ page.

Make a DIY Filter Adapter for Your Lens Using a Large Sponge

A few years ago, photographer Samuel Chapman of The Rocket Factory found himself with an annoying problem on his hands. After purchasing a number of neutral density filters for his DSLR, he found that Nikon's $2,000 14-24mm lens didn't have any good way of being used with a filter.

He had already paid hundreds of dollars each for his fancy filters, so he decided to make a makeshift adapter for the 14-24mm lens... using a sponge. The result is a product Chapman calls the "FX Sponge Filter Holder 5000."

Ambermatic App Applies a Filter to Your Photos Using a Real Pair of Shades

Last year we shared a clever "real world Instagram filter" concept called InstaCRT, which took submitted photos and rephotographed them on a real CRT monitor to capture a CRT look. Seeing the success of that project, Ray-Ban has decided to use the same idea in a clever bit of marketing to promote its Ambermatic sunglasses.

To show people what the world looks like through sunglasses fitted with Ambermatic lenses, the company launched an iOS camera app called Ray-Ban Ambermatic. It can apply a yellow tint to your photos using a real pair of Ambermatic glasses.

Using a Prism for Creative Photo Effects

Have you ever considered adding a prism to your camera bag? Washington DC-based wedding photographer Sam Hurd has done quite a bit of experimentation using an equilateral prism -- the kind used in schools to teach properties of light -- to add special effects to his photographs. The results are pretty interesting.

Tutorial: How to Create a Wet-Plate Look Photography Using Photoshop

Faking the look of old films is becoming ubiquitous in the world of mobile photo sharing apps, but so far the popular apps have stuck with various films and not older photographic processes. If you want to create a photograph that mimics the look of a wet plate, it's actually pretty easy to do in Photoshop.

Canon’s Official Solution for Stuck Lens Filters: Use a Hammer and Hacksaw

When travel photographer Craig Pulsifer accidentally smashed the front of his lens recently and found his lens filter fused firmly to the metal threads, he went to Canon for help. The removal process explained to him by a Canon Professional services technician is probably something most people wouldn't think to try: use a hammer and hacksaw to surgically remove the stuck filter. Pulsifer followed the advice, and found that it works quite well (though he does warn that it's "not recommended for the faint of heart").

Transform an Ordinary Sink Filter into a Soft Focus Lens Filter

Photographer Nick Cool came up with one of the strangest pieces of do-it-yourself camera gear that we've seen so far this year. He took an ordinary stainless steel sink filter -- yup, the thing that catches food at the bottom of kitchen sinks -- drilled various-sized holes through it, and stuck it into a filter ring after taking out the glass.

Kenko Filter Stick is like a Lorgnette for Your Camera Lens

You know those handle-equipped glasses called 'lorgnettes' that were popular among fashionable women in the 19th century? Instead of being fixed to your face, the spectacles were simply held up to your eyes with one hand, and were used mainly for style rather than vision correction. Kenko's new Filter Stick is kinda like that, except for camera lenses instead of booshie eyeballs.

MagFilter Uses Magnets to Give High-End Compacts Some Filter Love

Compact cameras are becoming pretty serious photography tools when it comes to sensor sizes and lens qualities, but one thing they generally lack is an easy-to-use filter system. Interchangeable-lens photographers can usually just find a filter of the correct diameter and use it with their lens, but things get more complicated when you're dealing with fixed-lens cameras. Although using filters is possible with some models, the systems aren't very friendly: they're usually proprietary, expensive, or based on unwieldy adapters.

That all changes with the new MagFilter by CarrySpeed, an easy-to-use filter system for compact cameras based on magnets rather than threads.

Comic: The Fortune 500 in the Year 2030

DOGHOUSEDIARIES created this humorous glimpse into what the Fortune 500 company list will look like 18 years from now, in the year 2030. We see that "Undo Instagram Filters Inc." leads the pack with $2.88 trillion in annual revenue.

It's obviously satirical, but it does cause you to think... What is the world going to do with the unfathomably large pile of filtered photos if/when the fake retro look goes out of style?

InstaCRT: A Camera App That Offers the World’s First “Real” Filter

Hovering somewhere between "novel idea" and "pointlessly stupid," InstaCRT is a new iOS app that bills itself as "the world's first real camera filter." Photographs processed through the app are given a CRT monitor look that doesn't involve any digital fakery. Instead, your photo is actually sent to the creators' machine located in Stockholm, Sweden, where it's displayed on a tiny CRT monitor and then photographed by a DSLR. The new photo is then beamed back to your phone in less than a minute.

Instagram Filters That Missed the Cut

Instagram's popular filters have spent the last year permeating into every corner of the photographic world, but for every one that was included in the app, thousands are left on the cutting room floor. Blake Williams over at Keepsy was given a behind-the-scenes peek into some of the filters that didn't make the cut. The one above was named "Dirty Bird".

Future Cameras May Be Equipped with Invisible Flashes

Future generations of photographers may one day look back and wonder why we often blinded each other with painfully bright flashes of light for the sake of proper exposure.

NYU researchers Dilip Krishnan and Rob Fergus are working on a dark flash that eliminates the "dazzle" effect of regular flashes in a low-light room. They've created this camera rig that combines common infrared photography techniques with an ultraviolet flash that produces a dim purple glow instead.

The team placed an infrared filter on the lens of the Fujifilm S5 Pro, which is has a modified CCD sensor that specializes in IR and UV photography. To supplement existing UV light, the team created a modified filter on an external flash to emit only UV and IR wavelengths.