I heard somewhere that if you place a nylon stocking over the lens of your camera it willact as a softening filter for portraits..is this fact or fiction?

Haven't heard of the stocking thing but have heard of putting Vaseline on the lense to soften and fade out sections of a scene. The stocking would probably work if it let enough light though. I think you would have to do some test shots and try stretching it different amounts. I imagine mesh would have the same effect.

:)

freakyclean

I think I have heard that approach before, either that or it was gauze or something similar to that. I also heard of some who spray hair spray on the skylight filter to achieve this effect.

To strengthen freakyclean's suggestion, George Lucas used Vaseline on the lense to smudge out the wheels of Luke's speeder in A New Hope. Back then they didn't have technology to make a 3D Model and composite it into a shot. That's why there's a purple haze under the speeder, they changed it to purple and said it was the speeder's "force". :P

In the enhanced version, there's a digital speeder :)

Oh yeah, and I'd imagine you'd have to stretch the stocking quite a bit.

Hair spray works well, but use a UV filter, skylights have a color cast to them and behave much like a warming filter. You can also use crinkled up saran-wrap (so i've heard, but i never tried it)
If you go for vaseline, a LITTLE bit goes a long way...trust me.

I shot some wedding portraits with a #1 soft filter...my clients hated the images. The shots were terrible, but I think it was due to the rain and hellishly poor lighting.

Okay cool. I never realized that about the Skylight - I thought they were the same. thanks for the tips guys. :)

Cokin have net filters available which look like they would create the same effect as "nylons". From what I can tell they look like crosshatches with different spacing, they have 4 different kinds (filter numbers 142-145). Their reference says to adjust by 1/3 stop.



freakyclean