Last weekend was Labor Day weekend, and I had no real plans. Instead of staying in as usual and being lazy all weekend, I made the conscious decision to go out Saturday to Santa Clara University specifically with my 45mm Minolta lens and Cokin filters to see if it would be viable to take that combination out for a day trip in the future.
The unfortunate answer is: maybe not.
I took my Cokin filters out to see how much of a hassle it would be to switch filters while I was out. The results are that it’s much easier than I expected. I had a lot of fun trying the different filters out, including stacking multiple ones.
My favorite was definitely the Sunsoft. It was a perfect day for it, too, since it was a sunny day. The downside was that I didn’t realize I was under exposing most of my shots, so most of what I took look terrible. There are only a few shots out of the entire batch I’m actually happy with, and I want to go back again in the future to try with some of the lessons learned.
My one bad decision is stacking the polarizer filter on top of my various diffusion filters. A few of the shots came out well, but it was the primary cause of my photos being under exposed. The worst culprit was the Polarizer + Pastel filters (none of them are worth showing).
Under the bright sun, I didn’t realize how dark these were (these don’t look nearly as bad as some of the others I’m not going to bother uploading). I didn’t think it was an issue when I bought my Sony ZV-E10, but not having a viewfinder is a really big problem.
I’ve been thinking about getting a more photography focused camera for some time now with a viewfinder to solve this problem.
It’s pretty funny to look at these and think of those filters you can slap on with photo apps, but these are all unedited lol. One of my favorite shots is of these red meters (?) using a polarizer + center spot filters. Exact same filter combination on the next shot of the garden through the gates.
I took a lot of shots of the bell tower, but most didn’t turn out well. The dreamy effect of the pastel did work well on plants instead. I also took a some shots of inside the church, but most didn’t turn out too well due to the booming from the indoor lights.
I think for my day trip this weekend, I should try to either take a Minolta manual lens, or use the Cokin filters on my 20mm Sony lens so I don’t need to worry about focusing at the same time. Most of my mistake was allowing my aperture to be too wide and allowing too much light in (making the boom really bad). I had better control of it from my previous post because it was indoor lighting, and I didn’t need to worry about the sun glare making the preview screen useless.