Tiffen 77GG1 77mm Glimmer Glass 1 Filter

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In the filmmaking world you don’t have that same pressure to find the ultimate in sharpness. A moving image is extraordinarily forgiving of what would be unthinkable in still photography. A little unsharpness passes without comment in a movie while the still frame from that image would be cast to the darkroom floor. In the film days it was not uncommon for focus in a motion picture to be off a bit now and then (it’s still not as rare as you might expect). Even big-budget films went to print with misfocused scenes. People say that Glimmer Glass gives the most sharpness, I can’t really tell myself. The two Tiffen filters seem equally sharp, Cinebloom maybe a bit less sharp (maybe). For astrophotography the better way to highlight brighter stars in images may be the use of some of the quite good Samyang lenses which are known to show slightly undercorrected spherical aberration leading to a similar effect while maintaining comparably high contrast and resolution in the whole frame.

There’s a slight mist in the air here—actual water vapor, not residual smoke from the forest fires—which gives its own diffusion filter effect in the light. This is greatly augmented by the filter, as you can see, creating a glow all across the houses in this small town. It’s worth noting that Glimmerglass comes in several strengths—the one I am using here is the weakest.But one has more freedom for further creative modifications if the base itself is very solid. You can blur any sharp image, but the other way only works in action movies where crops of single frames of 240p/12fps surveillance cameras magically sharpen up to the same quality as if that cropped area was taken with a slightly stopped down 400mm/2.8.

The effect of the Glimmerglass filter shows most obviously in the sun-bright portion at the top edge of the image where the white sun suddenly blooms, the white glow spreading out over the leaves and the tree trunk. There is a lowering of contrast—the Glimmerglass image might initially look dull in comparison. I’m not sure if there is a loss if resolution or not—higher contrast can give the illusion of sharpness and lowered contrast thus seems less sharp. NiSi recently released a so called “Star Soft” filter which I might give a try in the future — maybe later this fall with less hot nights with less atmospheric turbulences impacting the image quality. In that case the brighter stars should seem more pronounced (as seen with the naked eye), but smaller stars may no longer be visible probably leading to an image with less details. To maintain a high resolution and contrast in the foreground this filter is split in two areas. So one can chose where this effect should be applied. I’m curious how the results will turn out. All the photos are shot with the Fujifilm X-T3 + Fujifilm XF 35mm f2.0 R WR on a tripod. Test #1 – Statue at Vestre CemeteryEven after I introduced the thought that we were looking at sharpness, even after I set the stage, were your first thoughts when you looked at the images about sharpness? Or were they about color, about the ocean, and most of all about the dolphins? If you hold it and shift it around so the light reflects off the glass, the surface of a Glimmerglass filter looks like it has been sprinkled with some sort of metallic dust, maybe gold. The particles aren’t really on the surface, they are sandwiched between two thin layers of glass, and they probably aren’t gold, though for the price of the filter I’m thinking maybe they should be. What’s left? I own a Tiffen 49mm Circular Polarizer that I rarely use. I probably should use it more, because CPLs are great for reducing unwanted reflections. To some extent, it’s theoretically possible to mimic Color Chrome FX Blue with a CPL filter, I think, although I’ve never tried. I also have a Hoya Intensifier (a.k.a. Didymium filter or Starscape filter) that I’ve used a few times. I have some 49mm color filters for B&W film photography, but obviously those don’t work well on the X100V (I tried). I also have a Hoya 80A filter, which actually does work on the X100V, but I pretty much never use it. The foggy effect these filters give at night isn’t overly easy to replicate in post – at least for me – but in many situations the K&F 1/2 also yielded unexpected and/or undesirable (side) effects. The number of pictures where I thought it actually added something to them was rather small and life is definitely too short to always take a picture with and without filter to blend them together in post afterwards.

The X100V doesn’t initially appear to be able to accept filters. There are no screw-in threads visible. But there’s a “secret” ring around the lens that unscrews to reveal threads, but these threads cannot accept filters. You need to buy an adapter to screw into those threads that has its own threads that filters can screw into. Make sense? But there are situations where doing everything in software isn‘t viable or simply not wanted. First, if you shoot video, it will cause very heavy workloads in post. Second, if you shoot on film…well, that‘s obvious. Third, if you‘re a purist and don‘t want to treat every image in post, or if you try to improve your “analogue” photographic skills.

I’ve been asked a few times recently what adapter and filters I use on my Fujifilm X100V. I will state right off the bat that my choices aren’t necessarily the “best” ones, it’s just what I’ve done. There are likely better options, and perhaps different choices that would be better for you, so keep that in mind. With that said, let me get right into the adapter and filters that I use on my Fujifilm X100V. Tiffen Glimmer Glass 1 is the least extreme filter, it gives a small amount of bloom and pulls down highlight contrast slightly, but shadows seems to be the same. Good for all around subjects like portraits where you don’t want a too extreme look, but still want to soften those strong highlights. I think it’s a bit of the same situation here. Sure, one can get very respectable to good results from really bad lenses if talented — I’m looking at you, Bastian! The Moon in this image dominates the composition and the difference between the Glimmerglass-filtered image and the straight image couldn’t be starker. They are different photographs. The dark foreground areas of the photograph look identical in each and yet in one the diffuse glow around the Moon renders a different Moon entirely. Again, one is not better than the other—that depends on the photographer’s intent and the viewer’s taste—but the different possibilities are clearly, and literally, illuminated.

Looking closely at it the filter looks like a lens’ front element that hasn’t been cleaned in a very long time. These filters are supposed to add a bit of glow to bright parts of the picture, similar to lenses with undercorrected spherical aberration. Many of the older fast Leica lenses are famous for this effect. Notice how the direct light affects diffusion filters a lot, especially Cinebloom that completely spreads out the highlights over a big area. Test #2 – Ingolfs KaffebarIn each of the image pairs that follow the Glimmerglass image is first, followed by the unfiltered image. For the displayed use cases (e.g. in the city) those filters reviewed here may be the smarter choice than a undercorrected lens or software based solutions as the results seem to be nicer. I have never been a huge fan of these so called “effect filters” but my friend Simeon Kolev showed a few cool pictures where he used these Diffusion filters to good effect, so I decided to give it a try. All of these filters seem to contain a higher density of very small implanted particles/defects. Those lead to a mixture of diffractive and scattering effects in the path of the light travelling through the optical system. Without going too much into detail most of those effects will lead to blurred light sources where the blurring might be well approximated by the superposition of some gaussian blurs with a filter specific distribution of different radii (it‘s not exactly gaussian, but close enough to keep that simple model — which is also implemented in most photographic/image manipulating software). Hence, yes, theoretically one should be able to recreate these effects quite easily with some work. The quality and taste of the whole dish are limited by the worst ingredients. For that reason I would never use a wine for cooking that I would not dare to drink pure.