New 35-100mm f2.8 and ND filters

maggiemole wrote:

I've been getting used to this lens, finding that my years of relying on the 14-140mm has made me very lazy, both in how I think and how I shoot. It is quite a shock.

The weather in the UK has been exceptional for February, with bright warm sunshine, so I carried out a series of shots to see how to use the lens wide open (for minimal DoF) with a lot of light.

First I applied the setting I'd been reading about on recent DPR posts: leave the aperture fixed at f2.8 and set the ISO to Intelligent ISO, to let it dictate the shutter speeds. This is new to me and it worked very well, in one instance forcing the shutter speed up as high as 1/8000 while the ISO stayed at 200. The results are pleasing when Photoshop applied the Auto correction: sharp, well exposed and with good colour.

Then I used the Tiffen ND filters, gradually adding one at a time to build up to a 5-stop reduction in light intensity and correcting for under-exposure using the same Auto correction in Photoshop. These results are not as pleasing: a much cooler colour, more residual highlights or over-exposed areas, and not so sharp.

My conclusion is that I shouldn't bother about filters unless I really need to slow down motion e.g. for waterfalls. Which I haven't yet tried, being a bit short of waterfalls. Do you have any advice about getting better results while adding ND filters?

Cameras used were the GX80 and GX7. Although the examples show slight differences in distance from the flowers, the different result is typical across the range of shots I took.

Thanks - Maggie

To be honest there is something going even with the non ND shot. I don’t know if it’s jpg artifacts from the forum or your post processing but the non nd shot should be much cleaner at those settings.