Introduction

Do you remember when tripods had to be threaded onto your camera each time you wanted to use it, so you almost never did? Then with the advent of quick release plates, it no longer became something you had to plan to use, and just became the perfect spontaneous addition to your kit. You leave the plate on your camera, even if the tripod use cases sit weeks apart from each other.

Now it seems this simplicity has found its way into K&F’s new range of lens filters, and it’s something that will remain always mounted to my kit.

Just recently, we looked into a series of square neutral density filters, and most importantly the ‘when and why you’d use them’. Square filters specifically are a must-have accessory in a landscape photographers kit, but are a very calculated and deliberate tool, and therefore something not well suited to a run and gun photographer.

If you’re of the party that likes to shoot from the hip, wander the streets of an unfamiliar town, and find yourself in unpredictable views, settings and landscapes, something faster and more versatile will find far more use than something you need to constantly pack up and pack down. Threaded filters on their own seem fast, that is until you’ve done it 20 times that day between the shade and open environments, and suddenly you find yourself dodging shots that otherwise would have made their way onto people’s walls. Fortunately, there’s been a recent revelation in this space. Something that’s sped this process up to mere milliseconds. These are the K&F Magnetic Filter kits.

What filters do photographers actually need?

The age old question. There’s a handful of filters that appear to newbies when googling what they need for their freshly unpacked cameras. Almost all commission based sales staff will try sting you for a UV filter, which in today’s camera world achieves nothing optically (with one exception — keep reading). Very shortly after shooting in broad daylight, a Circular Polariser (or CPL) becomes an obvious next purchase, usually then followed by something more special effects, like and ND2-16 for use in simple video, or ND 64 - ND1000 for your more special effect time slowing, right up to mist filters for that nostalgic charm of the 70s.

The K&F Concept Magnetic Filter Kit

As implied above, threading and dethreading lens filters can get old quickly, particularly if doing this multiple times a day like in any professional application. I keep a small filter wallet in my pack that has my most-used, but after a few uses, I leave it in there buried under other gear, as it just slows me down far too much. K&F have addressed this issue in one of the simplest, fastest, and low profile ways that have absolutely revolutionised my use of filters in the field.

Their design involved an always-on magnetic ring that screws into your lens thread like a conventional filter, albeit containing no glass or mount other than a sunken seat/ledge to lock the changeable filters in place. The entire rim is magnetised, as are the adhering filters, which firmly snap into place with a satisfying click, allowing you to change filters in a measure of milliseconds, whilst holding them firmly in place.

It’s honestly something that at first blows you away with its speed, effectiveness and convenience, but almost as quickly as it impresses you, it becomes your new normal, and you wonder why it’s taken this long for a product like this to even hit the mainstream.

A useful inclusion is the small padded accordion style bag, that can house all the filters, and the lens adapter ring whilst not in use. It’s simple, but something that’s welcome compared to a lot of single filter purchases coming in awkward plastic or cardboard square boxes which you never actually throw in your pack.

The filters themselves

Circular polariser (CPL)

A mandatory addition to every photographers kit should honestly be a circular polariser. Sure, in an ideal world you’d only ever shoot sunrise and sunset and milk that coloured sunlight as it reaches across the land. But with golden hour lasting really only 40 minutes at the start and end of each day, the reality is you’ll find yourself shooting a large percentage of your gallery in glaring light.

This is where CPLs are king. I won’t explain the function of a CPL, as that’s something you can easily google and find thousands of articles and examples of, but I will explain that using a CPL, particularly at midday, will drastically reduce, if not completely remove glare and reflections off reflective surfaces such as water, leaves, windows and objects, whilst also deeping the blue of skies in the process. Sometimes the effects can be undesirable, or the almost 1 1/3 stop reduction in light too much for the handheld photographs you’re planning on capturing, and in the instance here where K&F have the magnetic snap on design, this can be the difference between you actually using your camera and not, in troubling light situations. A rainforest is a prime example where the bright midday sun is almost completely eaten by the forest canopy, pushing you into high ISO and wide aperture shooting conditions, but a sudden opening with a waterfall that’s now glary and bright is something you want to both control and quickly capture without removing a UV or similar filter in place the CPL you’re aspiring to use. It’s honestly brilliant.

K&Fs polariser which shipped as part of this kit is super low profile. Not requiring the threaded screw fitting on the glass itself has made this one of the narrowest filters i’ve ever used, let alone seen, and it makes a satisfying whack as it mounts to the front of your lens. As usual with K&F filters, the Nano-X coating prevents any sign of internal reflections or contaminations, and lets you use it in a range of lighting conditions.

In use, I noticed a slight colour shift toward green and yellow, something that’s common in CPLs, and an effect I actually enjoy as it suits my aesthetic, but it is definitely worth noting that a very mild colour cast is present in this filter that perhaps isn’t so pronounced in more expensive alternatives. This is honestly a very subtle colour cast however, and can be tamed with a very slight white balance tweak in camera, or in lightroom. The polarisation of the filter is top notch, and was able to eliminate all the reflections that were present in my scenes,

No visible ghosting or flaring, even when shooting directly into the sun.

UV Filter

Sigh. The amount of times I’ve heard sales clerks convince the ill informed that they absolutely need one to improve the image quality of their camera is almost criminal. Back in the 90s when you were shooting Kodak Ultramax 400 on your Olympus point and shoot, sure, a UV filter would help reduce some unwanted colour shifts. But today on digital sensors, their use case is so limited, and in fact, detrimental in a lot of cases. Your lens manufacturers spend millions of dollars in R&D controlling internal reflections — the light that bounces around the inside your lens between the elements of glass, and in all cases these are not flat planes of glass, but instead curved (or aspherical) to perfectly match the optics inside your lens. Without this level of R&D, often the use of a clear UV filter can do nothing more than induce reflections between itself and the front element of your lens, actually adding unwanted flares and smears to what would have been a completely unscathed image.

There is a hidden benefit of a UV filter though, and it’s actually quite substantial. A lot of lenses, particularly the EF L series lenses made by Canon boast ‘weather sealing’. However, if you read the fine print, you’ll find these lenses are only sealed to their rated IP level when using a UV or equivalent filter. I’ve had my cameras in the humid rainforests of Papua New Guinea; blasted by 240km/h rain and winds amidst Hurricane Nicole in the open plains of Iceland’s north, and just general abuse from sea mist, rain spray and dirt, that would have destroyed a $4000 lens if not for a protective clear filter threaded to the front of the lens.

Fortunately, K&F’s iteration of the UV filter appeared to show no sign of unwanted internal reflections, ghosting, or flaring thanks to their robust Nano-X coating, which for me is a really important note as a lot of my shooting is directly into the sun. Oddly, I found the magnetic bond between just this filter and the adapter ring to be quite weak and unstable compared to the CPL and ND filter also in the kit, but having said that, no amount of shaking, swinging or normal use case force could get the filter to detach from the lens. Just something worth noting.

ND1000 10 stop blackout filter

This is the fun one. Heavy ND filters that fall into that ‘big stopper’ territory let you manipulate the passage of time in weird and interesting ways, but are an accessory you’ll almost always need a tripod for. 10 stops is a huge amount of light reduction. In a scene where you may be exposing a scene for 1/10s shutter, adding one of these filters to your lens will change this to a 100s exposure, letting you slow time to a halt. These are fantastic for using in front of waterfalls, coastlines, skies, or crowded areas of a city where you want the foot traffic to virtually disappear into a sea of motion. They’re a super fun filter that can really create some interesting images if used well.

As discussed in an earlier review where we looked at the square/resin filters, I mentioned that something that makes shooting with ND1000s challenging is how prone they are to colour shifts, often pushing towards red as the slowest wavelength of light. So far in my testing, I’ve found the ND1000 to be an exceptionally clean filter, with almost no noticeable colour shift. The magnetic filter mount also completely blocked any light leakage, resulting in clean, sharp long exposures, all in a micro form factor.

Avon Wilderness — shot with K&F Magnetic CPL attached.

Conclusion

Carrying a collection of filters on you whilst heading out for a landscape photography shoot day, threading, and unthreading can get old fast. Often to the point where you either choose to stick with just one of your filters, or sometimes even opt for none and just run a bare lens.

It sounds trivial, but often when you’re shooting with a tool day in day out that actively slows down your shooting, it’s something you begin to use less and less, and find other ways to get similar shots that don’t require it, often at the compromise of your image. I find this is the case with my square filters, and unless I’m going somewhere with a dedicated purpose to use a graduated neutral density filter set up on a rock waiting for the perfect light, I try and avoid the need to use them at all.

By K&F introducing this magnetic system that doesn’t require any adaption to my kit other than a sub 1 second snap on motion, It has absolutely changed my approach to shooting with a range of filters in the bag.

The filters themselves are of exceptional quality, especially given their price. What you get in this package from K&F is something that time and time again will make you smile at how simple and easy it is to get the shots you wanted, with the aesthetic and quality you expect with no recognisable compromise.

Get yours at the link below:
https://au.kentfaith.com/SKU.1627?tracking=60ee4d654e1d7

Magnetic Photography Filters — The New Normal