Filters: Seriously?

benlonghair · Jun 22, 2009

Good afternoon all.

Been looking around at more gear. One thing I've been looking at are filters. Specifically a neutral-gradient filter and a polarizer. Neither is especially cheap. Not new-lens-expensive, but still not something I want to be buying doubles of.

Am I missing something or does each lens need a set of filters? My 18-55vr is 52mm and my 70-300vr is 67mm and my next purchase will probably be a 50 1.4 AF-S prime which is 58mm.

Am I really gonna need to buy the same filter for each one? That seems kinda dumb.

manaheim · Jun 22, 2009

You can get lens thread adapters... I tend to buy most of my filters in 77mm sizes and buy adapters to work my way up. The major problem with this is it interferes with lens hoods even more than a usual filter would (in some cases making them impossible to fit) and that you are no longer able to use the lens cap with the lens... so you need to have an extra lens cap of that size available.

Other than that, it works well and allows you to focus more money into fewer better filters and makes it so you don't have to carry 4,000 filters around.