When Should You Do It

Lens filters are thin glass shaped or coated glass filters that are screwed onto the front of a camera lens to extend the possibilities of images that you can achieve.

The simplest lens filters are known as window glass filters and are really only there to protect expensive coated lenses from accidental damage.

Next, and very popular are skylight filters and they cut out some ultraviolet wavelengths from reaching the camera lens. This enhances blue skies a little and skylight filters are often left in-situ by owners, attached permanently to a lens as an additional protective layer, similar to a window glass filter.

Coloured filters were commonly used in black and white photography to either boost or reduce contrast. However since the advent of digital darkrooms, sales of coloured filters have dropped dramatically.

By contrast, sales of polarising filters have remained strong. This is because the effects that are achieved with a polarised lens (reducing reflections from some surfaces, removing glare and boosting saturated skies by eliminating unwanted reflections) are the photography effects that really cannot be faked in a computer on photoshop.

Neutral density filters are also still sold. They reduce the amount of light that comes in to the camera and allow the photographer to play around with much longer exposures than would otherwise be possible.  They are available both as uniform density and graduated density where the top or bottom of the filter is darker than the other end. These are traditionally a tool of landscape photographers who use graduated neutral density filters to get full detail in a landscape without ‘blowing’ the highlights in the clouds. The darker end of the filter covers the clouds so that the exposure can be set for the ground properly.

Finally, the world of close-up or macro photography is where you find people using closeup filters. These work in the same way as a pair of reading glasses. They are small curved lenses that slightly enlarge the image before it enters the standard camera lens. Multiple closeup filters are sometimes screwed on top of each other to get even higher magnifications.

Nowadays, the small flat compact cameras that most people buy are brilliant so whybother to switch to a heavy, expensive and complicated Single Lens Reflex camera?

Ultimately switch when you are no longer happy with the quality of shots you produce in your little camera.You can take better shots with a dSLR for many reasons.

Firstly, in cameras, size matters. All digital cameras have a sensor in the back but not all sensors are the same. Even if a compact camera’s sensor has 10 megapixels, the chances are that the sensor size will be around five times smaller than a 10 megapixel digital SLR. You simply get  sharper images with better colour fidelity and less ‘noise’ from a larger sensor.

Secondly you have far more control over the shots with a digital SLR. Small automatic cameras have to make choices about exposure, aperture and other aspects that are artisitic choices. The automatic software is great for snaps, but if you want to creatively decide on the mood of a photo it is easiest to control aperture, exposure and so on manually.

You can swap lenses. There are hardly any compact cameras with interchangeable lenses. Switching from a telephoto to a macro radically changes the type of shot you can achieve. Yes, your compact camera has a macro function and a ‘10x optical zoom’ sticker on the side, but the inbuilt lens just cannot compete with a good set of lenses. High Quality changeable lenses are really very much better than ‘all purpose lenses’

You can shoot in the RAW which is nothing to do with going out in your birthday suit but everything to do with an absolutely brilliant feature of digital SLR cameras.  As the name implies, RAW files are the raw data recorded by the sensor.  Jpegs by contrast have already been processed by the camera before saving. However there are many ways of processing a shot and all of them mean the camera has to ditch data, compress files, muck around with colours and generally monkey about with the scene. If you save a file in RAW format you have the luxury of making all the key decisions at your leisure whilst sitting in front of your computer. Only once you are happy with brightness and colour cast do you ‘process’ the image into a jpg file for printing or uploading to the web.

The first time I saw what shooting in RAW format allowed me to achieve I was dumbfounded. I promised myself two things. Firstly never to shoot pictures in JPEG again and secondly to tell everyone I could about just how fantastically happy I am that I switched from a compact digital camera to a digital SLR. So, that is why I wrote this article.

About 60% of the way through a contract is a great time to ask for an upgrade. A good reason for not signing long contracts is that the company won’t upgrade you so often.

Do remember to be polite when asking for an upgrade and don’t get angry if they say no. Just leave it a few days and politely phone again. Usually on the 5th or 6th call they will upgrade you just to shut you up.