Making your own photography filters?

I just stumbled on someone talking about making their own filter out of a tea bag and I'll be honest... I started to chuckle. Till I went to Google and found when there are a ton of pages talking about people making their own filters. Seriously? Have any of you tried any of these your self? Personally I wouldn't use one for serious work, but curious of the quality.

So long as some blur is acceptable, why not??? If you require very high IQ with all of your filters, then this will take a lot of work.

Kelly Cook

Funny Kelly. I haven't run across this and am not sure what you could do w/such a filter, but people are developing film using coffee and orange juice (or vitamin C tablets). It's called 'caffenol' and works but seems to give rather dark prints.

www.alternativephotography.com/wp/darkro...-process-with-coffee
www.digitaltruth.com/data/caffenol.php

I guess you can have breakfast and develop film at the same time, or after you're done dunking your teabag in your cup slap it on your lens and go take a picture.

I heard they used to use vaseline for that soft focus look... I'd never put that on my lenses though. Maybe cellophane? Cellophane with vaseline on it?

At one time Cokin had a vaseline kit. One of their clear filters, plus a few tubes of various gel colors. For this I would just use an old UV filter, not put the gook on the actual lens surface!!!

Examples of soft filters here -

kellycook.zenfolio.com/soft_filters

Kelly

KCook wrote: At one time Cokin had a vaseline kit. One of their clear filters, plus a few tubes of various gel colors. For this I would just use an old UV filter, not put the gook on the actual lens surface!!!

Examples of soft filters here -

kellycook.zenfolio.com/soft_filters

Kelly

Are you being serious?

www.cokin.co.uk/pages/speceffects.htm

Yes, completely serious

Well I could manage to get a smear on my lens or filter easily enough without even trying. Why would someone want to shoot thru goop? Oh, yeah, I've shot photos of hockey thru scratched smudged up glass, hmm. Why spend money on that? - just go to your neighborhood local rink!

I think it's called "art"

No need for soft filters these days. 2 min in PS and you have the same effect.

Also plenty of digital filters you can buy (click topaz labs link below in "Vendors".

Only filters you really might need these days are grad ND, ND and Polarizers.

Good luck making a home made polarizer. A home made ND/Grad ND filter will probably suck.

But if you want to try it for fun, then go for it. One fun thing to try is bokeh cutouts.
www.diyphotography.net/diy_create_your_own_bokeh

It used to be common to stretch womens' black hose over the lens for a soft focus effect. It was a glamor photography standard. You could buy a fancy soft focus filter for $50+, or a package of hose for $2.50. I bought a Gary Fong Tupperware diffuser for $50, but now I'm smarter and make my own for $2.

Back in the days of film most photographers never bothered to learn processing. Among those that did it was a small percentage that had regular access to a darkroom. Among those it was an even smaller percentage that would rather spend hours in the darkroom duplicating an effect that could be accomplished in seconds (or split seconds) by using a filter.

Today photographers doing their own processing is much more common, and it takes minutes rather than hours. So people are more willing to do it in processing. But if you know you are looking for a particular visual effect, and it's easy to do in camera, why not cut down on the processing? It's pretty easy for me to deal with lint, dust, stray hairs, litter, etc... in Photoshop, but I still try to clean it up before shooting, because that's even easier. If you are looking for the effect that a teabag stretched over the lens makes why not just do it in-camera? I have a buddy that attaches scratched up plexiglass in front of his lenses. I'm sure he could accomplish the same effect in PS, but he likes doing it in camera, and it's easy and fast.

Also people like fiddling with things, and doing things differently than they are supposed to. In an artist's statement explaining the teabag filter is going to come across a lot cooler than saying "I did it with an app."

KCook wrote: At one time Cokin had a vaseline kit. One of their clear filters, plus a few tubes of various gel colors. For this I would just use an old UV filter, not put the gook on the actual lens surface!!!

I used Vaseline occasionally, but I didn't want to carry a jar of he stuff nor get it near my cameras, so I applied it to a filter on the enlarger lens when printing.

I have to admit that my film printing skills were pretty basic. And I shot almost entirely with Ektachrome, so I just let the labs handle the printing.

old bones

To this day, I still keep a few sections of black womens hose in my camera bags....Rubber bands too....