Photography News | Issue 44 | absolutephoto.com
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First tests
SRB 77mmND1000 Rugged Filter £39.95
Specs
Price £39.95 for the 77mm version Type Long exposure filter Factor ND3.0 or ND1000 (10 stop) Size availability 49-82mm Material Glass Front filter thread No Coating/s Unknown Contact srb-photographic.co.uk
Verdict
This ND is a very good performer. Its innovative design helps shooting in gloves, and the butterfingered can be assured by its rugged properties. Its price point is attractive, too.
Pros Image quality, rugged build, price Cons Some problems with working with lens hoods
Once they were virtually unknown in photography, but within the last ten years long-exposure filters have become a phenomenon. There are now plenty of ten-stop filters on the market, and almost any landscaper or fine-art photographer youmeetwill have one in their bag, allowing them to shoot with slow shutter speeds in full daylight. With the number of filters on the market, it’s no surprise that manufacturers are looking for subtle ways to innovate the basic light- stopping design. And this is the latest from SRB; a ruggedised ten-stop filter, featuring an extra large mount that’s designed not only to withstand bumps, but also to make handling easier. It’s certainly affordable, too. The 77mm versionwe tested is only£40, but prices start at just over £30 for 49mm, 52mm, 55mm and 58mm sizes. A significant saving compared to many, then, but does it stack up in the quality stakes? I spent a few days shooting landscapes with it in the Faroe Islands to find out. Broadly, it’s a very good performer. When placing anything on the end of your lens you run the risk of degrading sharpness, but testing with identical aperture and focus settings, with and
edges, but nothing more than about a stop, so not particularly noticeable and easily corrected. I also tried shooting in aperture-priority on a Nikon D810. Here the camera metered exposures about 2/3 stop under, so it’s an option if you’re pushed for time, not confident in manual or just lazy. All long-exposure filters produce colour shifts, and the SRB ND1000 is no exception. These can be adjusted in Rawprocessing, but aremore of a factor if you shoot JPEGs. Shooting in auto white-balance with the filter attached, pictures had a warm cast, compared to the unfiltered shots. Unfiltered, the camera judged auto at 5200K, and shooting through a range of manual white-balance settings, the closest to this unfiltered version was around 4200K. So, that’s about a 1000K adjustment if you want to get colour spot on at the time of shooting. Some low-cost long exposure filters can also have a tendency to fog shadows with infrared, giving them a brownish look without trueblacks. I didn’t see any sign of this with this glass filter. HandlingwisetheSRBND1000was mostly excellent, too. The filter’s larger mount is definitely easier to grip than a normal filter, especially ingloves, which I was working in a lot, and the large indentations mean that you can screw the filter onandoffwithyour fingertips. I initially thought the extra size of the mount would be a problem with lens hoods, so tested it on a variety of my lenses. It was fine with wide-angles, where the hoods are more splayed, but, though it still fitted, it was a bit trickier on telephotos. Once screwed in, you
Shot in AWB
without the filter attached, I found no real difference that I could see. Image sharpness was excellent, and I noticed no fall off at the edges either. Another test of any long exposure filter is the accuracy of its light stopping rating. The closer it performs to its specification, the easier the exposure is to predict, which is important as you’ll likely be working in manual mode for long exposures. Under or overexposure will cost you editing time and image quality. Pleasingly, the SRB ND1000 produced very accurate exposures; comparing two images shot in manual mode, one at 1/60sec, and the other at 15secs, they were almost identical. And not just to the naked eye; I overlaid the exposure histograms The filter’s large mount is definitely easier to grip than a normal filter, especially in gloves
design also doesn’t prevent you from adding a lens cap onto the filter when it’s fitted though. I managed to test the ruggedised properties of the filter by accident. Having been in splendid isolation for much of the test, I toppled over right in front of the first pair of tourists I came across, eliciting an American whine of “Jeez, are you OK, man?” I wasn’t, having skinnedaknee through trousers and waterproofs. The ND1000 though was unharmed, despite a fairly brutal introduction to the road I was climbing onto. Aside from a slight scuff it was undamaged, andperformed to the same high standard for the rest of the test. KS
can’t remove the lens hood, nor can you add it after the filter ismounted. The rugged design also means that you can’t stack other filters to the front of it, but that’s not a big deal as they can goon the reverse. That said, at verywide angles, the casing produces some hard vignetting. This was quite obtrusive at 16mm, still slightly visible at 24mm, but had been eradicated at 28mm. The
of both to the same conclusion. The only real difference was a fractional increase in contrast in the longer exposure. There was some fall off of light at the
Thanks to the Faroe Island tourist board (visitfaroeislands.com) for its assistance in this test.
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