One of the things I love about the photography industry is that there's no shortage of myths and folklore. You'll probably hear a bunch of different myths and claims as you develop your career and I have to say it's a lot of fun.
In a recent video from two of my favorite photographers and YouTubers, Tony and Chelsea Northrup; they discuss some of the many myths that photographers still believe. Most of the time the myths that we believe tend to be rooted in something real or something that was once true. For example, many photographers still use UV filters which is honestly beyond me. There's a very good chance that no lens has ever actually been protected from impact damage by any UV filter in the history of photography. Also if you shoot with a digital camera then UV filters offer virtually no improvement to your images. Personally, the myth that I believed for a long time was that you should never delete images in-camera. This is quite obviously not true and something we can ignore.
Check out the full video linked above. Also, are there any particular myths that you used to believe? Are there any myths that even though you no longer believe, you still have trouble letting go of?
Quite so.
Absolutely!
You beat me to the punch.
And what makes you so credible?
Another person's credibility or lack thereof is in no way an indicator of my own...
It’s always easy to point fingers. Anyone can sit behind a keyboard and talk about how other people are such and such.
That does not make me incorrect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6BYzLIqKB8
haha!
"It’s always easy to point fingers. Anyone can sit behind a keyboard and talk about how other people are such and such"...........and some people do it in front of a video camera and post it on youtube...........
He isn't the one presenting pseudo scientific information, so his credibility is irrelevant.
That's pretty harsh.
Ah... Tony at it again. The "only" truth teller, The Discloser of Lies, Myths and Legends.
Regarding Usmans comment about UV filters, read this:
Many years ago I dropped the soft case with Canon 100-400 L IS in Papeete. Filter got bend, cracked and slid into the thread of the lens, which was made of a harder material, as it should be. When we returned to Honolulu I gave the lens to a shop, to remove the filter, what they did. Lens seemed fine, and I used it for several more years. With another "not-needed" UV filter of course. However once home, I sent it in to Canon for a checkup. They said: no damages, they merely did the std. maintenance, whatever that was.
They have put out too much BS. I don't watch their BS videos.
Since the ISO story my new maxim is, "If Chelsea & Tony say so, it means it must be wrong". They are far too approximate (they confuse diffuse light, soften light), which is not condemnable but there are already too many people who say crap on the net
Really? This is all a load of spurious nonsense.. And they need a whopping 30 minutes to espouse these ridiculous non myths.
Click bait for ad revenue.
I never thought twice about deleting images from the camera until I had a one on one CPS training session and the instructor told me it was better not to. He said it was something to do with the image numbering, I don’t remember exactly how he described it. He said if you need room go ahead and delete but it’s always better to wait until you have downloaded to hard drive so that’s what I have done since.
I usually use a polarizer filter vs staight UV but occasionally I HAVE had a mishap that resulted in damage to the filter glass. To me that was always the primary reason for a UV filter anyway: lens protection! I mean, sacrifice a $75 filter over a $750 lens? Yeah, I think that makes sense.
Certainty never heard the "don't delete in camera thing" though. I almost always do a rough edit in camera in terms of obviously bad shots. In 15 years of various DSLR cameras it's never once been a problem. That said I do use Copy + Paste into my hard drive first once I'm home, and only do a full delete after I know it's all there on the drive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0CLPTd6Bds
I don't keep a filter on my lens to protect it from impact. I keep it on to protect it from sand and other grit that blows in the wind. It's also a requirement to complete the weathersealing on certain lenses so there's that reason, too.
That's a fair point that only applies to an extremely tiny percent of photographers who are regularly shooting in aggressive conditions. (and the video does mention that situation)
Re: filters protecting lenses-I have had more than one lens (a Nikon 70-200mm 2.8 was saved twice!) by a UV filter-both from impact and from blowing sand, and in one case, sticky and gooey filling from a cherry pie...so I think I will keep them screwed on the front of my lenses.
UV filter manufacturers explicitly state that their filters are not designed to protect against impact damage.
That thin piece of glass protected against nothing and the impact which wouldn’t have damaged your lens broke your filter making you think your lens was protected.
That’s not impact damage though is it?
(Also, to be fair, you have to clean your front element just like everyone else, you are just making a UV filter your front element. It doesn't make cleaning any easier or harder)
I can screw off a particularly dirty filter and just clean it with running water under the sink so I would argue that it does make cleaning a lot easier in some instances.
To each his or her own, but I wouldn't use tap water to clean lenses. There is a reason products like rinse aid exists for dishwashers. It is because tap water often leaves streaks or fogging on glassware. It won't ruin a lens or anything but it can often mean re-cleaning with a better cleaning solution. (which defeats the whole purpose)
For me, 99% of lens cleaning happens in the field and I can get it done perfectly in less than a minute using a lens pen, microfibre cloth, and some sort of blower or brush. It is trivially easy and quick.
I don't use tap water to clean lenses. I use it to clean protection filters (along with dish soap) if they get really dirty for some reason. I've yet to run into any issues and even if I did, I wouldn't care because it's not a lens—it's a filter. The whole benefit of having the filter is that you rarely ever have to touch the actual glass on the lens itself and it's disposable.
People say all sorts of stuff about how hard the glass of the front optic is and how durable coatings are, but any piece of glass that you're exposing to the elements will eventually get scratched and any piece of glass that you're repeatedly cleaning will eventually start to get cleaning marks.
It's not the biggest deal in the world if you plan to keep the lens forever since scratches on the front element really don't affect the image quality much (if they even do so at all), but if you occasionally sell your gear, a filter is a good idea simply because buyers freak the hell out about any little scratch, swirl, or fingerprint on the front element (even though there's no reason to) and it dings the value of your lens more than anything short of fungus and haze. :/
The way I see it is. I have never had a lens show any signs of what you describe even though I have run many of them without protection, on location, for years. I have shot in harsh winter, beaches, forests, mountains, abandoned building, etc. They are cleaned regularly with high-quality cleaning materials and never experience any sort of scratching from cleaning. In fact, the few lenses I have actually worn out were all internal wear, the glass was still perfectly fine when I retired them. Anecdotal, yes, but I feel pretty confident that this will continue to be the case. (and I don't treat my lenses terribly well. They are often just tossed around, thrown back in bags without lens caps, etc.)
If I spent $75-100 on a UV filter for every lens I ever own, we would be talking thousands of dollars over my career thus far. (aka enough to replace a lens on the very low chance that I experience damage that a UV filter might (probably wouldn't) protect against. Not to say that is true for everyone, but I'm still pretty confident that if we could somehow measure the value of UV filters sold globally and compare it to the repair costs they "actually" have prevented that we would be looking at the cost of those filters being magnitudes higher. (Yes, I know it is impossible to actually measure this)
I totally understand and agree with the logic behind using UV if you are a war photographer in the middle east and your gear is constantly subject to being sandblasted in severe condition. Or if you are a landscape photographer who regularly is working in extreme weather or are around saltwater spray. But for the vast majority of photographers who are shooting family, portraiture, travel, events, etc are simply not in a situation where a UV filter does anything but lighten their wallet. (and perhaps harm IQ depending on the situation and the quality of the UV filter)
Anecdotes are all that ever seem to get traded in these discussions. I agree that it would be very enlightening to see the results of a real study on this subject. Of course it would be met with anecdotal claims on each side about how their personal methods differ and lead to superior results, but at least we would still get some sort of average. Right now, it just seems to be a lot of speculation.
At least one instance in which I would HIGHLY recommend using a protective filter is with vintage lenses. A lot of them didn't have the hardest coatings back then (at least nothing close to what we have now) nor did they have coatings that repelled things like water to the degree that current lenses do.
I posted the link to a video that tests UV filters in a controlled setting above.
Umm... I meant more of a study regarding the cost of the total money spent on UV filters, the amount of monetary damage that can be attributed to UV filters, the amount of front element damage on lenses without UV filters which would have been prevented if the user had one (like scratches or moisture), and the total cost to repair front element damage on those lenses across a wide population. Get a wide enough sample size and we can at least see whether they make a decent value proposition.
The video you posted is absolutely ridiculous. A protective filter is a thin piece of glass. It's not there to protect against impact damage. I don't know anyone who goes jousting with their camera lens so I'm not sure what the heck kind of impact damage that test is supposed to be simulating either. My lens hood protects from impact damage. The filter protects from the elements. What kind of idiot would use a thin piece of glass to protect a lens from being bludgeoned?
Had to laugh at the jousting bit. :)
I also cannot see how a filter would protect a lens from the kind of impact that would have sufficient force to break the filter. Most modern lenses have the front element almost flush with the filter thread so there would only be a few millimetres, if that, between the filter and the front element anyway.
I have old lenses with some scuffs and scratches on them and if I didn't tell you they were there you wouldn't notice them in the resulting images. So while no one wants their lens' front element scratched, it might not even be the end of the world anyway.
Oh, it's definitely not the end of the world. People are just paranoid about it because they're not well informed.
Because evidence suggests that it does very little to actually protect the lens in almost all situations. You will spend far more money on UV filters than you ever will repairing front elements.
Short of dropping the lens front first on a spike, impact to the front element when the lens is dropped with a lens hood on is obscenely uncommon and even if that happens, for the UV to have saved the lens the fall has to be strong enough that it would have damaged the front element but weak enough that it doesn't destroy the lens internals. It takes a very specific fall for a UV filter to be the difference between a ruined lens and no damage. I've had several lenses take a front first swan dive onto concrete over the years. No UV filter. They went to the repair shop for internal repairs, the front elements were never harmed. On top of that if you watch the video I linked above, you will learn that many filters aren't much stronger than paper. It is very easy to break a filter which then showers your front element in sharp shattered glass.
Unless you plan for the lens to be going through pretty extreme conditions where exposure to blowing sand or salt spray or similar is a risk, the UV is pretty irrelevant.
I use a “filter” on every lens I own in place of a lens cap. UV, Skylight, clear, etc Im not picky. I sent a Nikkor 80-200mm 2.8 to Nikon for service. It came back with the filter broken from poor handling by UPS. The lens and filter ring were fine. I never thought that a protective filter added anything to an image other than a flare at certain angles. I have no qualms about cleaning the filter clean with a T shirt and my hot air. If the filter protection is a myth then we should throw out our lens caps.
Reading some of these comments saved me from wasting time with the thirty-minute video. Thirty minutes? Sheesh. To think I might have watched that drivel.
It was the author's retort to a critical comment "And what makes you so credible?" that clinched it for me.
I see he has also authored "What to Do If You've Been Sexually Assaulted." Yep, you can read/watch it right here on FStoppers.
Lenses are quite tough. I have lenses (28 and 35) I still regularly use that have been dragged through sand and water. Also had the 35 and a 85 f1.4 hit solid ground while still attached to the body. While the lens hoods were cracked, the lenses themselves are fine. Heck, I even think they're slightly sharper now. j/k :D
I dislike the video premise, they use their unscientific personal experiences and observations as evidence for debunking "myths".
Good vid. The other myth I would have added is the myth that saving images in 72ppi is best for web or displays. In fact ppi has no bearing on how an image displays. There is no difference between a 10ppi image and a 10,000 ppi image. in other words, when it comes to web or digital display, ppi isn't relevant.
Regarding card failures and user error, I don't think user error is likely to result in card failure, but I do believe that image loss as a result of user error (losing card, accidental deletion, damaging card, etc) is far more likely than image loss due to card failure.
Sorry bollocks to your statement, no camera lens has ever been protected......... not true. By all means give you view, but please don’t go and spoil things by making such a silly statement which is as much a myth as those in the video.
I once had a cannon 100mm f2.8 that I knocked over....blah blah blah
What the video appears to prove along with all the comments is that photography is fuelled by a diet of a never ending stream of bullshit, and the thing is we photographers can’t get enough of it; Sony poor colour science, 3D pop, The MF look......