What are the Basic Camera Filters?

"Hi, this is Scott Vallance on behalf of Expert Village.com. We are going to be talking about filters today. I am going to tell you about six of the basic filters. The first one would be the skylight filter which is basically a clear filter that protects your lens. It is the same thing as a haze filter which has a slight blue cast to it which is supposed to cut through haze. Basically it is a skylight filter which just protects your lens. If you drop your lens you would rather break a $20 filter than a $300 lens. After that we have an intensifier filter. This actually enhances the reds if you shoot like out in the desert or you shoot roses or something like that you want to kind of give a little bit of vibrancy to your reds. This would be the filter for you. It can bring a little bit of a pink tone to your neutral whites so you have to be real careful about that. Another real common filter is a polarizing filter. Polarizing cuts down on reflections off of any non-metallic surface. It will also darken skies, increase contrast to your clouds, make your clouds whiter, skies darker, cut down the glare that the sun is giving you off leaves and things like that and basically just gives you a lot more contrast and richness to your photos. After that we have a neutral density filter. These come in powers of 3,6,9. Each 3 stop increments or 3 number increments represent 1 stop. What you use these for is if you want to do long exposures to blur your water out. You can put these over your lens and it will decrease the amount of light that actually gets to your film by the appropriate number of stops, depending upon the number on it. This particular filter is a grade A neutral density. This is used to shoot out door scenes so you can keep your sky looking correct and still exposed to your foreground if you are shooting a house. If you have ever noticed that your house looks really wonderful and the sky will be really bright, you can put this over your lens and kind of watch where the gradation goes and it will darken your sky and leave your foreground just the way it is. We have one more which is the fluorescent filter. If you shoot inside of office buildings or something like that, the office fluorescents are horrible, it has a green cast to it, looks absolutely terrible. This is a magenta filter. They make several different ones. Each fluorescent tube has a little different tone to it but you can just go in and ask for a FL filter or fluorescent filter and it will get you real close to neutral skin tones. That is all we have for today. Thank you."