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Clip-In Filters?on: August 1, 2021 at 10:28 am
As you mentioned, I do use an STC clip-in filter for IR — the advantages are pretty obvious in that you don’t need to get filters for all your lenses. There are a few disadvantages to this approach, however, if you plan to switch filters with any frequency.
1) Clip-in filters are tricky to remove, store and replace — my hands are not particularly large, but I find it difficult to insert and remove the filters without touching the surface. Changing filters in the field risks dropping the filter and is generally awkward.
2) Dust can and eventually will get behind the clip-in filter — at least on my A7RII which is a dust magnet — and so cleaning the sensor has an extra step. I had hoped the clip-in filter would keep dust off the sensor, and perhaps it reduces it a little, but it’s still a problem. Cleaning the sensor off in the field with a blower becomes a lot harder since you need to remove and replace the filter. For the most part, I just keep my 24-105 on my IR-converted body and leave the filter in all the time except for the occasional cleaning. It is nice, however, to know I could remove or replace the filter with one that has a different cutoff wavelength if I want to in the future.
Jonathan Sachs
Digital Light & Color
www.dl-c.comRe: New Article By Michael Durr – Aluminyze Metal PrintsReply #1 on: July 9, 2020 at 6:35 pmHaving seen your article, I recently sent in an image to be printed 20×24″. It is a rather dark, black and white image that includes a full range of tones from black to white. I have previously printed it successfully on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Bright White using Piezography inks. While it prints well on paper, it looks even better on a calibrated flatscreen monitor, presumably due to the monitor’s higher contrast ratio. Hoping to get a more luminous print, I selected the glossy silver finish which Aluminyze advertizes as “luminous”. What they don’t say is that printing with this finish renders whites as a dull gray and in fact compresses the tonal range rather than expanding it as I had hoped. The blacks are not as dense as I obtained when printing on matte paper, it appears to be missing some of the mid-level gray tones, and the detail seems not quite as crisp. The glossy surface also produces annoying reflections that further detract from the finished image. If you catch the aluminum print at just the angle with enough illumination behind you, it does light up, but it is almost impossible to set up a viewing environment that works for the entire print. Even with the 30% promo from PhotoPXL, I still wasted $84.
Aluminyze did offer to reprint the image with a white finish at a 60% discount, but my guess it that this would likely have been at best no better than printing on paper so I passed.
Not to say they did anything wrong other than fail to provide enough information on their web site to make an informed choice of finish, but if you do order from them I strongly recommend first getting a small test print before ordering a large one, and that you avoid the glossy or matte silver finish unless you have good reason to believe it will work for your image.
Jonathan Sachs
http://www.dl-c.comJonathan Sachs
Digital Light & Color
www.dl-c.comRe: Too Much Photo Gear – GASReply #2 on: May 20, 2020 at 6:56 pmKevin,
As a fellow victim of GAS, I feel your pain. While lenses hold their value and work with updated bodies, I think it’s smart to sell old backup bodies as soon as you upgrade.
Before you get rid of your A7RII however, consider having it converted to shoot IR. I had Monochrome Imaging Systems do this for me about a year ago and have been overjoyed with the results (see attached). If you get a clip-in IR filter from STC, you can use the converted body with any of your lenses without needing IR pass filters for each one.
Jonathan Sachs
Digital Light & Color
www.dl-c.com -
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