Sean Esopenko

I was going through my collection of filters, digging out coloured and UV filters in preparation for my jump to film photography, and came across a Rodenstock Light Red #25 filter. I had never seriously used it back in my photography classes so I wanted to see what it does to a landscape. I grabbed my Canon 5D and an incident light meter and quickly headed outside for a little “assignment”.

The guide that came with the filter recommends an exposure increase of 3 stops for this filter. I needed a “control” shot so I took one photograph without the filter using the recommended settings from my incident meter for F13. I then screwed on the red filter and shot one frame with the exact same settings. I applied the 3 stop increase to exposure, as recommended by the pamphlet included with the filter. All three shots were taken with a graduated ND filter in place to keep the sky under control.

Finally I headed into the house, imported the photos into Lightroom, and applied a greyscale development setting. I immediately saw a contrast difference with the filter but it was obviously due to the darker exposure. The 3 stop increase with the filter lost all the tonal detail in the sky. I “cheated” and used Lightroom to apply a 1 stop increase to the metered exposure with the red filter. This gave an image similar in luminance to the control photograph but I immediately saw the difference in the contrast between the two.

Theoretically, whichever colour filter you apply, you will darken it’s complementing colours. The red filter is meant to bring extra “pump” to the blue and green end of the colour wheel. This increases the overall contrast of the outdoor landscape, usually dominated by blues and greens. It was a good exercise to perform and I thought I should share my results. I will now have a better idea of what the filter will do when I start shooting large format (hopefully in the next week) and there is less of a chance of an unexpected surprise in the darkroom.