Using 85ND's and a tungsten WB outdoors

[remoteman]

Hey all,

I'm going over to cambodia to shoot a promotional observational documentary for a charity on friday (two days away). I only found out i was going two days ago so obviously things have been a bit frantic here. I'm taking a 5dIII and a 7d.

Anyway, i bought a mattebox on monday as i have recently bought a lens with a filter diameter larger than the tiffen nd's that i already have, i was planning on borrowing a mate's 4x4 ND set (.3 .6 .9 1.2 + pola) but he picked up a short film today which is shooting whilst i'm away, so he needs them. I was in a large rental house in sydney today picking up some tape when i noticed that they had a huge bunch of old filters for sale, all schnieders, 4x4's and 4x5.65's. All $30 or so, retail for a .6ND is $240 here. They had no normal nd's, just old stuff like coral, bpm's etc, but they had a full set of 85nd's with a pola, for under $100, is there any reason why i couldn't just buy these and use them for this trip instead of having to shell out about a grand? Would there be any serious image degradation in using them and shooting with a tungsten wb outdoors? It would be inconvenient, sure, but it's a last minute thing and i don't really have the cash to spare at the moment. Logically it makes sense to me, but i'd love some input.

Cheers,
Sean

TL: DR Is there any noticable image degradation when using 85nd's outside with a tungsten white balance.

 

[dop16mm]

The general consensus is that digital sensors are natively daylight balanced, so using tungsten filters would starve the blue channel, possibly increase the chance of IR pollution. But in reality it would be no worse than shooting in uncorrected tungsten light. Best to test for yourself to see if it is acceptable. What you wouldn't be able to do is stack them, as you would get double the color correction and it would get very orange. Full sunny day daylight can actually be much bluer than standard white balance, and the correction may not be as harsh as you think.