Recommendation on filter for slide film

I like reflections too. Especially, water reflections. I took a b&w shot a couple years ago of a building reflected in a lake. At first I forgot that I was shooting 8x10. Since the image was upside down, I took my loupe and started to focus on the reflection instead. Mirror images in water are cool though.

On the other hand, I have a 35mm Kodachrome 25 slide of a bridge scene where I dialed out the reflection in the water. In that image I found the reflection was distracting to the photograph. I compressed the scene with a zoom lens so that some limestone sticking out of the water would be included in the photograph. I also used a very light diffusion filter which blended everything towards green. The water is green and vegetation is green of course but now the white limestone rock has a slight green tint to it and the wooden bridge even looks green. Printed on Cibachrome it looks great.

My cousin begged me for a print of it. I hear that it's still hanging in his family room. He wanted to see the actual scene but when I showed him he couldn't believe it. The limestone is white and isn't that close to the bridge and the wooden bridge is brown. No it's not real but it does make for a nice photograph.

I like realistic photography but I also like things that are not realistic. It all depends on the photograph. I was a huge Pete Turner fan back in the 80's when I shot the bridge scene. Peter Lik I don't really care for. I think of Lik the way I think of Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce. They both are really popular but too sweet for my taste!

Popular with who? One was predictably over-the-top for his corny era, the other just a photographic clone of Thomas Kincade's slippery business model. Guess if someone in Barstow won the lottery and put up a big drywall McMansion, and still had wall space left over after hanging their collection of black velvet Elvis rugs, Peter Lik might come in mind. First time I accidentally walked into a Kincade gallery I broke out laughing - he sure had some nerve. Then the first time I accidentally walked into a Lik gallery I nearly vomited, literally. I've always suspected he uses kindergartners on LSD to colorize his images in Fauxtoshop. Vegas tourist stuff. I'd was stuck there for a trade show, and the boss wouldn't let me rent a jeep to get to the desert on the outskirts of town, even with us having a spare day. Had to go to a show instead - y'know, part of the team thing; and that was right next door to the gallery. Appropriate, I guess, in a town where everything is faux. Otherwise I pity people like Lik because they've never lived yet. Nature is just another piece of meat to them; so they don't bother to even see the beauty of real light.

I use polarizers to make clouds stand out and to eliminate unwanted reflections such as on glass windows. Polarizers are easily over used and serve no purpose when photographing fog.

DREW WILEY said:

Otherwise I pity people like Lik because they've never lived yet. Nature is just another piece of meat to them; so they don't bother to even see the beauty of real light.

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PL was once a benchmark for wide-format landscape photography here in Australia. That changed when he was influenced by the USA and its lust for over-the-top depiction of colour (a trait he shares with Duncan et al) and, latterly, what can be achieved in Photoshop by a team of computer wizards and a distorted sense of imagination as reality. Dombrovkis, Lik, Dobre and other immigrants all made a fantastic mark in early landscape photography. For a couple, as legends their names endure even in death, as does their work. For PL, it is entirely forgettable and will remain so going forward.

Apparently nobody is aware that "polarizers" themselves impart color, and that color varies from brand to brand, vintage to vintage. I used a few for some commercial photos, commonly with .05R gel.

jtk said:

Apparently nobody is aware that "polarizers" themselves impart color, and that color varies from brand to brand, vintage to vintage. I used a few for some commercial photos, commonly with .05R gel.

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Neutral polarisers have existed for many years. B+W and Hoya chiefly, also Cokini's Pure Harmonie series.
Anybody buying cheap Chinese polarising filters should expect a liquorice all-sorts of problems.

DREW WILEY said:

Popular with who?

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No one on this forum or LFPF apparently. From what I hear Lik sells a lot of photographs. Like I said, I don't care for him either. I also don't care for Thomas Kincade or Jesse Barnes. My wife's brother has a Jesse Barnes painting hanging in his dining room. The whole family was marveling at the "Painter of Light". My mother-in-law asked me if I didn't like it. I just told her it wasn't my type of art.

Well, he does hire very slick sales people, to me reminiscent of time share hawkers, car salesmen etc, but probably well commissioned, just like Kincade set up slick franchises (and later got indicted for ripping em off). I imagine most of his ludicrously high asking prices are negotiated way down; and there is zero evidence that he has ever sold a print anywhere remotely in the range he claims, unless it was hypothetically a straw purchase. The galleries are basically showrooms, then they print and frame the image to specified size in a dedicated facility. The method of mounting of the bigger print is competent and justifies a few thousand bucks for the framing alone. I'd pay em a bit more gratuity if they took a box knife and cut out the image first, before delivering the frame, to save me the hassle of doing it. I already know where to buy Krylon fluorescent spray paint if I want that special Lik look on the wall.

jtk said:

Apparently nobody is aware that "polarizers" themselves impart color, and that color varies from brand to brand, vintage to vintage. I used a few for some commercial photos, commonly with .05R gel.

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I have never had a problem getting neutral polarizers because I ask and check before I buy. You must be hanging around the wrong places.

Ahem ... I bet if you very critically tested them, you'd discover that the expensive neutral polarizers are not themselves perfectly neutral. Perhaps significantly better
than older and cheaper versions, but not perfect by any means. My best one, a B&W, still benefitted from an .05M. Ideally, it would have been a tad less M, but I wanted glass. This was critical copystand repro work.

DREW WILEY said:

Ahem ... I bet if you very critically tested them, you'd discover that the expensive neutral polarizers are not themselves perfectly neutral. Perhaps significantly better
than older and cheaper versions, but not perfect by any means. My best one, a B&W, still benefitted from an .05M. Ideally, it would have been a tad less M, but I wanted glass. This was critical copystand repro work.

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This reeally is splitting hairs.

In my work it is the quality of the subject as a photograph. Never once has a client noticed a tint or cast that they think requires a correction. Having said that, two manufacturers stand out as having the least desirable/reliable neutrality in polarisers: Canon and Tiffen. Kenko Zéta C-POLs and B+Ws KSM C-POLs are my favourites.

I would honestly struggle to notice a cast requiring .05M correction, yet this does not by any means imply carelessness or a lack of judgement in printing. Too busy to play silly-buggers with tiny figures.

In most cases, .05 is not enough that it cannot be corrected in printing. With certain films it is. One routine instance for me involves the tendency of hard shadows in
Ektar to go blue-cyan without warming correction at time of exposure. It's very difficult to post-correct. I can easily detect a 1 cc difference in actual prints (this requires some training, not just physiological ability), but anything like .05 would be waaaaay off for me. In many cases, color is the "subject", just as much as shape or form or texture or aliens having a picnic with Elvis.

iandvaag said:

A graduated ND filter is super useful in helping to fit the entire scene into the limited dynamic range of slide film. This is only applicable to landscape-type photography, where the upper portion of your image (sky) is significantly brighter than the lower portion of the image.

Some people use a mild warming filter (e.g. 81A) when shooting Provia in the shade, otherwise it can go quite blue.

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I found a 81b filter, a little more filtering than the 81a, also I will try ND 3n5 filter too, and I will post any pics of velva 50 "expired film". If thread is closed check out my media.

ericdan said:

Provia needs 81a or at least a skylight filter to take the blue cast out. At sunrise/sunset, which is what the film is probably designed for, you don't need any filters.
Velvia 50 requires the same filter, but the blue cast is a little less apparent.
Velvia 100 is fine without. That film has a magenta cast anyways.
I shoot these films in Tokyo, results may vary with location.
But the above recommendations are also in Fujifilm's pdf instructions for the films.

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Have you tried a magenta filter?