I use:

* Linear Polarizer - great for aquatics and removing glare from windshields; popping up colour on bright days . . .

* NDs - solids .9 and .6 . So these plus my on board .9 that would be 2.4 of ND. I also have .6 and .3 grads - I use this in various combos to allow natural illumination on dark areas to be retained while grading back "blown" angles - PLUS for keeping iris wide open for those shallow DoF options.


* Tabaco Grad - Oh this is a must for some of those industrial dramatic shots. PLUS, used on sunny days with the pola makes for very CSI type looks!! Yeah, I'm a poser too!!

* Supermist Black - great for digging out detail from forest shadows;

* Skin Tone Enhancer - not just for softer than soft skins BUT used in nature I can get some really sumptuous layers

I don't do funky STAR effects nor the Fog options . . . .

I treat filters as ways to clamp down illumination to allow quieter parts of frame develop AND for those shallow DoF options.

I suppose I could be persuaded to go with some sunset enhancers and maybe a pink/orange grad . . .

Grazie

The key to filters is a good mattebox to handle them. With just screw on, you are limited. It is hard to use a gradient with a screw on.

I can't imagine going out without the following available:
Clear for protection.
Polarizer
A selection of ND grads

After that the filters are dependent on the shot. I prefer to do many things on the camera rather than wait until post.

I routinely carry:
White Promists
Sunset grads
Blue grad
Tabacco grad

If you haven't guessed, I like and use grads.

Sumptuous selection Keith! And yes I use the Kestrel Matte box. I have had an extra static element fitted. Gives me major options for twisting a grad and then some!!

Tell me what you use the "White Promists" for?

I'm like you, I much prefer using filters in that dynamic/analogue/optical way to get the feel.

Grazie

The white Promist gives that gentle halo around soft subjects. It softens like a nylon stocking on the back of the lens, but adds a lite white halo as well.

If you go to http://www.kolbokorp.com/vids/itec.htm, at the bottom is a button to play clips from a biblical short. There are tow places that the white Promist shows up. One is in the beauty shot of Adam and Eve in the water and the other is later when two gentleman are breaking bread with a third gentleman.

Keith

http://www.cybercollege.com/tvp013-2.htm

good info on filters here,, but the most important thing they remind you is once you use the filter,, you used it, no undoing it-- have a good monitor to check the effect

Certainly once you put a filet on a lens you cannot undo it, had some dimwit shoot a whole day with a grad ND on the camera, really 'good' FX when you're doing dutch rolls!

However as further up the food chain than me said, with a filter you record how you felt about the shot on the day. Yes you can do much the same today with a DI but when you make the choices with a DI you've lost the feeling og the shot on the day.

Can I also point out that there's many variants on grad filters, soft edge and hard edge being the main ones.

The other small trap with filters and DV is the more expensive filters are designed to work on 35mm optics, the results can be dramatically different on a DV camera.

Bob.

What does a ".9" ND filter mean? That it blocks 90% of the light? If so, would that make it about 3 stops (2x2x2=8, so 1/8th of clear or 12.5% passed)?

A 0.3 ND is 1 stop
0.6 is 2 stops
0.9 is 3 stops.

So Grazie, with his 0.3 and 0.6 grads can use them both to get 0.9
The 0.6 is of most general use if you can have only one.

Bob has provided important warnings. Grads come in different flavours and hard edges are good for things like seascapes (nice clear and straight horizon) and the Aussie outback, while soft gradients are better for more general scenes. You have to be careful using a grad to make sure the edge (ie the filter) isn't within your depth of field; use large apertures (add a straight ND if necessary). Coloured grads are nice for faking up sunset skies or adding a little more interest to the sky area. I saw a doco recently (BBC Horizon, perhaps) that had a grad on for practically every shot, so even buildings had a nice rosy tint to their upper floors. Of course grads are not limited to fiddling with the sky; you might be wanting to hold back any bright area in the frame. Clearly it is difficult (unless you're shooting for "Horizon") to use grads without a matte-box having a rotating stage.

The matte-box lets you use several filters simultaneously, including gel filters that you might make up for specific situations (so you don't render upper stories in rosy tones). And you might want to add a low contrast filter (such as a white promist) where darker areas need a boost.
Filters that contain particles and designed for large format cameras (these days that means 35mm) can go badly in small format cameras using 1/6 to 1/3 inch CCDs. Always try before you buy.

Bob! Hysterical "once you put a filet on a lens "!

Of course once used I cannot remove the resultant effect. However, once I "got over" this fear and realised that I do use my internal ND and F stops to setup my camera too, how different is that from using filters? Extra NDs? See? So, as I said, I use them for setting UP the camera, much like F stop settings, and if I get that wrong?

And yes Serena, I purchased with this in mind. I can elect to have an extra 0.9 to the top or bottom over and above the internal 0.9 SOLID within the camera. The 0.3 is a SOFT edge and the 0.6 is a HARD edge. I gave this much thought to get what I wanted. This setup is very flexible indeed.

OK, here is a remarkable website that gives examples of the use of filters, OK on 35mm stills photography, but this website and its real world examples truly provided me with my first "visual" understanding and built my early confidence and foray into the use these valuable tools - and they ARE tools!

http://www.leefilters.com/downloads.asp

Oh yes, once I got back BLUE skies on my DV work, that was it!

Grazie

Grazie, that's a good site and I hadn't looked before at those instructional examples -- very good.
A book I found useful for getting a better handle on filters was "Image Control" by Gerald Hirschfeld A.S.C. (Focal Press, 1993). This talks about the whole gamut of image control and amongst this are examples of using low contrast, fog, polarising, diffusers etc.

As you've already said, here we're not talking about whether to do the effect pre or post shooting, this is all about bringing the illuminance range of the scene within the range of the CCD or film. Once you've let highlights over expose or shadows loose all detail, no amount of clever post production will bring that detail back. You might well decide that fake sunset is best done post-production (Spot gives a good example in the VASST Colour Correction Tutorial DVD), but if you've burnt out the clouds in the taking there is no miracle in Vegas for fixing that (except adding clouds from stock shots). And the examples in the Lee filter tutorials demonstrate how effective grads are for image control even when there is no sky in frame.