Introduction

For years I’ve been asked by new, and up-and-coming photographers ‘what filters should I use for my camera’. It seems the natural progression of hobbyists after first acquiring their new SLR/Mirror less camera to then go on the hunt for the next lens, and finally, what filters to enhance their photography.

It’s always been a tough one to answer. Filters aren’t intended as a band-aid to improve your photography, and they never were. They’re often thought of as the tool missing from a kit that must be the source of their lack of progress, or the differentiating factor between their best images, and those they see online, in print, or on Instagram.

Don’t get me wrong, filters are amazing tools to have in your kit, and strongly encourage every photographer to own at least a CPL to control nasty glare and reflections; whilst every videographer absolutely MUST keep a set of Neutral Density Filters (or even, a vari-ND for fast adjustments on the fly), but they’re not the be-all and end all of good imagery.

That is until you delve into the filters for specialist use cases, such as what’s been provided here by K&F Concept (Kentfaith), with their square filter kit, ND1000 and GND16 (1.2) graduated Neutral Density filters.

Until now, buying square filter kits for photography has been an expensive venture. Usually, if you want to do it properly, you’d have to stick with LEE filter systems, mortgaging your house in the process. LEE truly are the industry leaders in this field, with there really being no other competitor that comes close to their build and optical quality. For the budget conscious, Cokin have their series of square & resin filters, but in my experience I’ve found the colour cast frustrating, and often unusable. The cheapest option, being the generic or unbranded variants available on ebay or Amazon are really only useful to develop skills, rarely producing any images that would be usable at the end of the edit pipeline.

What K&F have achieved, and most importantly at the price point they’ve done it at, is nothing short of remarkable.

Build & Optical Quality

As mentioned above, the filter kit came with the two glass filters including the square ND1000, and the rectangular GND 16 Graduated filter. For landscape photography, this combo is a fantastic solution to slowing time and darkening skies, and is essentially a must-have pair in the landscape photographers tool bag.

Both filters come in an acceptable quality PU leather case, with a super handy pull tab to save you fighting with the low profile nature of the case, and allows for super fast removal, which in use I found to be a really nice touch. The case isn’t super high quality, but for the purpose of protecting the filters whilst stowed within your bag, and most likely trekked up mountains and into forests, its as good as you’ll ever need.

The mid-level quality starts and ends at the case however. The sheets of glass themselves were honestly jaw dropping in both their build and optical quality. In the corners of the filters you can see where the filter coatings have not been applied fully to the edge, which some users will notice, but in my experience found it actually gave perfect contact points to pick up and position the filters without leaving grease on the lens surface itself. And to be honest, it’s barely noticeable.

Filter Holder Kit

Not all filter holder kits are equal. This is something I’ve found through a range of brands across a range of models. Some have poor tolerances, causing filters to slip, bend, or simply not fit, others rotate too freely so you can’t position your GND appropriately, and others don’t mount flush enough to your lens and let ambient light flood in and ruin your scene.

The K&F filter holder comes with 8 individual lens rings for pretty much every lens you’d have in your bag, with 49mm/ 52mm/ 58mm/ 62mm/67mm/ 72mm/ 77mm/ 82mm variants. As I’ll be mostly using the Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II ultrawide lens, the 82mm variant was what I used for the extent of this review.

The rings have a very high quality thread that screws and unscrews easily without jamming, and the filter holder itself mounts in this VERY useful button release mechanism, which on its own makes K&F’s implementation one of the easiest to use. The ability to quickly detach and reattach your entire filter rack in milliseconds makes for fast and easy scene composing, unobstructed by the intense loss of light incurred by the ND1000.

ND1000 ‘Big Stopper’

ND1000 filters are an interesting tool, and their benefit of being almost pitch black, allowing you to slow your shutter speed (and hence, time itself) by enormous amounts, usually comes with the caveat of a strong colour cast. Sometimes this cast is a product of the filters not adequately blocking the UV or IR light entering the camera, resulting in either a blue/low contrast haze, or red wash respectively. But I was both thrilled and surprised to note that the K&F filters were 100% free of any of these usual problems, whilst the coatings themselves completely eliminated any internal reflections.

ND1000s provide a 10 stop reduction in light. For context, if you meter your scene for a 1/125 exposure, adding an ND1000 filter to your lens will allow you to obtain the same exposure with a shutter speed of 8s. This is incredibly useful when wanting to smooth the flow of water, traffic, clouds, people in busy areas, cars, aircraft, or any other scenes of constant moving matter.

GND16 100x150x2.0mm Reverse 4 f-stop Graduated Neutral Density Filter

Overexposed skies are the bane of my existence. Digital sensors have come a long way, especially in modern cameras like the Fujfilm XT-4 and the Canon EOS R5, but there’s still something about recovered highlights in post that just don’t match what you can do on-location with a GND filter.

For those unaware, a graduated neutral density filter is a taller sheet of glass, with the top having the full extent of the rated light reduction (in this case ND16/4 stops, often referred to as 1.2), gradually lessening until it’s 100% transparent and having no effect on exposure. This is incredibly useful when shooting in troubling environments, such as where I was shooting here in Noojee. The incredibly dense forest makes the floor substantially darker than the canopy, and can cause havoc with finding the sweet spot for exposure.

Usually I would aspire to run a 0.3 or .06 GND, as to subtly reduce the sky, rather than cause a dramatic reduction, however K&F provided a much stronger 1.2 GND which was actually quite interesting to work with, and in this setting was quite useful under the overcast sky and dense forest below.

Conclusion

In use, these are such a great addition to the kit. The low profile and easy to store filters find a home in almost any bag, the 82mm filter ring is now a permanent fixture on my 16-35mm lens, made allowable by the fact the lens cap to still attach to the lens even with the ring attached. The fast on - fast off quick release feature lets these be a spontaneous addition to a day shooting, without slowing you down or getting in the way of the creative process.

The build and optical quality of these filters is exceptional, especially given their low price point relative to their competitors. Without any knowledge of what these cost, I’d have assumed they were worth 3x their RRP.

The optics are clear, sharp, and without any noticeable colour shift, softness, vignette or image degradation, and overall are a wonderful addition to a landscape photography kit.