Orange filter under overcast situatian

There is contrast, and there is contrast. If you want the overall contrast of the film to be higher, you develop it longer, thereby increasing the contrast index, or gamma.

What the orange filter does, is change the spectral response of the system. This may, or may not, change the contrast of the scene. It depends on what colors are in the scene and where they are.

The filter works by attenuating the colors that have a wave length shorter than that of the filter color. That is, the orange filter attenuates blue, green, and to a lesser extent, yellow. This has the effect of changing the contrast of the sky, for example, if there is any blue sky present. That is, it makes the blue sky darker and thus makes the clouds stand out more from this blue sky. Using the same orange filter when shooting a gray rock with red and orange algee spots, has little to no effect.

So... shooting in the rain, with no blues in the frame, it makes no sense to shoot with an orange filter. You aren't going to increase contrast this way.

If you want to have more contrasty negatives in general, then develop your film for a longer time. The zone system calles this N+ development. The zone system can teach you how to control negative contrast, among other things. If you are interested in learning more, there are many books on the subject. My favorite is still the stuff from Ansel Adams, in particular The Negative which I've read several times now. Fred Picker's Zone VI Workshop reduces the zone system to just a few easy to follow and remember steps. There are many others.

That orange filter won't do much on an overcast day, Kit. The most noticable effect it has in on blue sky, but for your shooting conditions the most it will do is rob you of a stop (or more) of exposure. When I shoot on overcast days I usually don't use any filter. If you want more contrast, which makes sense on a dull day, you can increase your development times. A dev time of 30% over your normal time would probably be a good place to start. I would shoot five or six frames at the beginning of one roll to use as a test strip. When it comes time to do your developing run those first few frames through your developer before you develop your important shots to make sure you are in the ballpark. Best of luck.

Dean

I shoot with a yellow or orange filters on cloudy and overcast days because it will give you more separation in tones in the sky portion of your negative. There is still a considerable amount of blue light being transmitted through the clouds. Try shooting a picture both ways and you will be convinced. The effect is subtle but very useful, IMHO.

Hogarth, Dean, Clay,

Thank you so much for the prompt response! I really appreciate your comments. Very informative.

Will take you advice. You guys out there are my best advisers@masters!Meanwhile. keep all the comments rolling! Thanks.

Kit

Clay, I have to disagree with you.

With a clear sky at midday, there are basically two kinds of light you are dealing with: sunlight, which is basically yellow-white light, to our eye, and casts strong hard shadows due to the sun effectively being a point source; and skylight, which is cyan in color and which casts soft shadows due to the fact that it is radiating from a large area (the sky) and coming from many different angles.

Because the skylight is blue and the sunlight is white, a yellow, orange, or red filter will attenuate the skylight more than the sunlight. The nature of things dictates that things not in direct sunlight (things in shadow) will only be lit by skylight, and thus the filter will attenuate the light reflected from those surfaces.

On an overcast day, the clouds are necessarily between both the sky (and the sun) and the ground. Thus, the light transmitted through the clouds is a heavily diffused combination of both sunlight and skylight. That is to say that it has a color of intense white light mixed with less intense cyan light. Because it is diffused, there is (in general) no directionality to this light. It's safe to say that all things in the scene are lit by the same kind of light. Without any separation of light sources/colors, a filter would pretty much just be attenuating the light evenly. This, of course, is valid only for the light colors. Individual objects will be more or less attenuated depending upon their own intrinsic color. i.e. shooting a red barn with green hedges with a red filter would darken the hedges and make the contrast between foliage and barn quite pronounced. But this would be based solely on the colors of the objects and not the color of the light incident upon them.

Long story short -- color B&W filters would do little to affect contrast on the whole when conditions are overcast. However, it can be interesting to use them just for separation of object colors. This, coupled with increased development can yield some beautiful results if done properly.

Best of luck, Peng!

Peng, sounds like longer development is what you want/need to beef up the contrast. The orange filter seems to me to be of little use here.

I tend to agree a yellow filter is what I would use with longer develoment time. Really depends on the subject.