I am usually diligent about using UV filters for everyday shooting. As someone else mentioned, they are cheap insurance, and my camera usually goes everywhere with me, often traveling in the bottom of a handbag & subject to abuse. I take them off in the studio, or in the case of shooting backlit portraits, as I was the other day... I grabbed the camera the next day to go to the bus stop for the first day of school. In our hurry to get out the door on that drizzly morning, the business end of my 16-50 collided with the pointy metal end of my daughter's umbrella. Hard. GAH! I was horrified - no filter! But -- no problem. Not a scratch. The only real damage was to my blood pressure...
I can see how bird droppings could be pretty caustic & wreck the coatings on a lens or filter, though... I am at the beach quite often & use filters there because of the salt & spray... now you've given me another good reason... :) -c On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 12:45 AM, Bipin Gupta <bip...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yes this is an oft repeated old stuff. But here is a version bottled > anew. Since my retirement I have been travelling a lot. Last weekend > we were in San Francisco. We love the wharf area and pier 39 plus the > rides on the historic cable cars. A very windy and chilly day. Lots > and lots of birds flying around for scraps of food. And eat means they > have to drop too. So bits of bird droppings broken up and propelled by > the wind do hit your camera and the lens. I was not spared. > Back at the hotel, I tried cleaning the filter with a blower brush and > the Japanese high fiber lens cloth (no China stuff). Faint spots still > remained on the Hoya 77mm Pro 1 Filter. Back home I tried a lens > cleaner. No luck. I could still see very faint spotting on the filter. > My daughter was quick to point out that bird droppings have strong > chemicals that can stain a lens coating, perhaps damage it. > I would now love to hear from our photographer friends, a) for whom a > filter is absolutely sacrilege, b) the Buddha's middle path takers who > say they take the filter off for important events, and c) those who > swear by the filter. > Bipin. > camp: San Mateo, CA and not from the far away enchanting land. > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
