Hitech filter adapters (or Lee) (or Cokin, for that matter)

[thewaker43]

Hey folks,

I have a Hitech 100 filter system. And was thinking of purchasing a

few new lenses. With this system you purchase adapter rings to fit

each lens. The adapters are around $40 US each. Step Up/Down rings

can be found for $5 at any local photo lab. It seems like I shoud

just buy the largest Hitech adapter ring that I have a lens and then

purchase step down rings for each smaller one. This would save

quite a bit of money. Is this the case? I mean it seems so

obvious, are there problems with my idea?

[thewaker43]

oh, and by the way, I use this with my Calumet 4x5 and 210 lens as well as my 35mm Nikon FM2n and D70. If that makes any difference. Thanks Casey

[tony_estcourt]

This all sounds sensible. You could go one step further and keep the step-up rings attached to each lens at all times and buy a few extra lens caps (of the largest size). If you were using filters all the time then this would overcome the time penalty of having to attach the step-up rings to the filter system.

[jimsimmons]

OK, Casey, what I'm about to describe to you may be confusing, but I'll do my best to describe my solution to this problem. Bear with me. I've got 3 LF lenses mounted in 171mm Arca-Swiss lensboards. The largest lens is a 90mm SA XL, which is huge, requiring me to use the 100mm Hitech filters. What I've done is to drill-and-tap and screw four hex-head bolts into the four corners of my lensboards, so that the flat heads of the bolts stick out from the lensboard such that they are about a 1/16" proud of the end of the lens. On the back side of the lensboard, I screwed a nut onto the end of the bolt to snug the bolt to the lensboard. (And painted the nuts and bolt-ends black) I then super-glued 4 small (1/4" diameter) super-strong earth magnets to the four corners of the Hitech filters. The bolts were positioned about 90mm apart from each other, so the way the system works is that I can simply pop any filter on to any lens in about 2 seconds, and they pop off in 2 seconds too. No adapter rings to screw or or off, or lose for that matter. Total costs: about $2 per lensboard and maybe $4-8 per filter. Yes, the bolts add weight to my kit, but it's a big kit anyway, and I roll it around in a plastic tool box.