Why you need to be using filters when shooting automotive content!

Hey Everyone! Welcome to my first blog on the new website. I found this to be an important topic for automotive photography so I chose this as my first topic.

Filters, we all know of them but don’t always know what they do. For automotive photography, they play a huge roll. Cars are big shiny, reflective objects that can sometimes pose challenges because of it. Using the right filter when shooting cars can drastically improve your final image.

To start with, we will go over circular polarizing filters or CPL Filters for short. These are the tool that should be used for all automotive photos. It gives you the ability to cut through reflections and glare. Like I said before, cars are shiny, reflective and big so when shooting them, you will sometimes lose saturation or detail because of this. A CPL filter can be rotated to give you control of what it’s doing. When you look through your viewfinder or on the rear screen you can see where it is targeting. Often, I like to set it so that it cuts the glare on the windshield and the side of the car. This ensures the car shows its lines, details and saturated color. Another benefit to using a circular polarizing filter is its ability to bring detail and saturation back into the sky or background. Often times, people perfect the car portion of a photo with very little thought about retaining the sky detail so this is an easy way to help.

Next up is a Neutral Density filter. Now a lot of landscape photographers will have these in their bags because it’s very helpful for slowing down waterfalls, ocean movement, clouds moving through the frame and much more. But they also have a huge advantage for automotive photography. When we shoot rolling movement shots of cars, we know that a slow shutter speed is what creates the blur effect. So if you’re shooting in mid day lighting, this can be hard to keep it properly exposed. You can try to compensate for the slow shutter speed by bringing your aperture to highest setting (F13-F22) but that will start to lose image quality. So by using a neutral density filter, it allows to you keep that shutter speed low and keep your aperture in the sweet spot (F4-F9).

So as you can see, filters play a large role in automotive photography. Some manufacturers like Polar Pro make a hybrid filter that combines a neutral density and circular polarizer which is what I tend to use most for automotive photos. Watch the video below for more info regarding this topic and stay tuned for more blogs to come.

Keep shooting and stay safe everyone.