Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/03/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]If you guys want to know a great way to damage your the front elements of your lenses. Place your 50 Summicron in a Domke insert without the rear caps. Now, place your 90 Summicron, 75 Summilux or 50 Noctilux front element down in the same compartment and walk or run around on a shoot for a while. Now, look at the front element of your lens and I'll bet you wish you'd had a filter on the front. When I first bought my first 20-35 Canon zoom , I didn't have a filter on it and that's more or less what happened, Needless to say I've got one lens with zero resale value and lots of B&W filters. I remove the rear caps on all of my lens while I'm shooting an events and front caps stay in a drawer. Good hoods protect lenses from most things but only if the object is larger than the hood itself. I find I replace filters every so often due to nicks from hitting other lenses in my bag. I'm one pro who uses filters, But my mentor and teacher, (another pro with a MA in photography) did too. What I don't know is a pro who uses front lens caps. Except for super teles..... Duane Birkey HCJB World Radio Quito Ecuador Jim Brick wrote: >Using a UV filter as protection is silly. What part of the entire surface of your camera, is the lens glass itself. Typically, a very small percentage. Now how, prey tell, can you bash ONLY THE GLASS OF YOUR LENS, without taking out the rest of the front of your lens. How often does something stick itself exactly in the lens opening and hit just the glass. Looking at your camera overall, the chances of bashing the camera, the pentaprism, the rangefinder, basically the camera itself, is far greater than having something zero itself in, precisely on the lens glass. If you are going to bash your lens, believe me, it won't be a dead center hit! If it hit hard enough to break or badly scratch the front element, you've got bigger problems than just the glass. So protect your camera. And use a lens cap.