55mm Circular Camera Lens Filter Kits

Make Specialized Shots with Filter Kits for 55 mm Lens Cameras

Once you have mastered the basics of photography, you may want to acquire accessories that enable you to make specialized shots that amplify the thematic qualities of the scene. Fitting a specialized filter over your camera lens can soften or sharpen images and brighten or mute colors. If your camera has a 55-millimeter lens, here are filter kits that can enable you to do this and more.

Here are some of the filter types you'll find in these kits:

• Polarizer.
• UV: Ultraviolet light filter.
• Colors: Red, blue, green, and yellow.
• FLD: For fluorescent light correction.

You can use one of these whenever you want to correct for the color distortions caused by fluorescent lighting. Let's say you have photographed family and friends inside your home or another building. When you look at the photo later, you discover that the colors -- especially the skin tones -- are distorted with a greenish tinge. The next time you shoot photos indoors, you put an FLD filter over your lens. The FLD filter corrects for fluorescent light, restoring the colors on your photo prints to their natural state.

Whenever you encounter glare, consider using a polarizing filter. Say that you're outside under bright sunlight, and you take a photo of a sailboat on a lake. The resulting photo shows the boat as a black spot in the glare of the sun's reflection on the surface of the water. The next time you shoot in bright sunlight, you use a polarizing filter on your lens. By turning the filter, you adjust the amount of light received by the film. The polarizing filter minimizes the glare, and the boat stands out in the image.

It may seem strange that you would ever want to use a noncolored filter to make a specialty shot, but gray filters are useful in counteracting the photographic trade-off between light saturation and film speed.

Say that you want to photograph a runner and emphasize the runner's speed by having his or her image appear blurred. You slow the shutter speed, admitting more light onto the film, causing color saturation and possibly overexposure. The next time, you use a gray filter on your lens. This reduces the amount of light admitted into the camera so you can keep the shutter open and get the blurred effect you want.

Even though they're not filters, lens hoods are some of the most common accessories in filter kits. Should you happen to drop or bump your camera, the hood will protect the lens from damage. Lens hoods can also improve picture quality. When you're taking pictures in sunlight, the bright light hitting the lens at a steep angle of incidence may cause lens flare. Fit on a hood, and you can keep lens flare out of your shot.