Photography by Mike Mander | Deep ND Filters Compared

Deep ND Filters Compared

February 22nd, 2015

Please note this gallery is linked to from a review on the Beau Photo Supplies Blog. Clicking -back to post- above will get you back to the originating post on the Beau Photo Supplies blog but all the other above links take you to my own personal website or blog. - Mike Mander

This gallery of colour-corrected and exposure equalized neutral-density filter test shots has four sets of shots with four images each, the first in each set having been taken with a bare lens (no filter) and then three different deep ND filters. The suffix on each filename will tell you which filter was used as follows...

-No suffix means no filter of course!
-FHF: Formatt-Hitech Firecrest 16-stop IRND
-BW: B+W 10-stop ND (110 ND 3.0 - 10 BL 1000x)
-TA: Tiffen Apex XLE-series 10-stop IRND

These were all shot with daylight WB set on my Fujfilm X-E2 and color correction in post was done by simply doing a click-WB on the raw file in Adobe Lightroom, choosing a suitably neutral area, either a gray patch on the ColorChecker Passport or a white part of the flowing water. The 'IRND' designation on the Firecrest and Apex filters refers to the fact that they also filter out infrared, which can sometimes affect the colour balance on long exposure shots with very dark ND filters. Please see the accompanying blog posting for more details...