This year I visited the Tiffen booth to check out all their camera accessories. As some of you may know, Tiffen is well-known for their lense filters and their Lowel line of mobile lighting kits. This year at CES, they provided all sorts of extremely useful accessories for your camera, whether it may be just amateur work or full fledged professional productions.

The first thing I checked out were their stedicams. The Merlin 2 is one of their smallest stedicam rig, but with great features. A deceptively little rig then what I was use to using, I was surprised when the booth people told me it would support my DSLR. Taking up on their offer, I tested it out briefly by mounting my DSLR. To my surprise, it had a very smooth track to it thanks to the counter weight that arcs down. You can guide the direction of the camera using the guide rings located just under the mount. It was tricky to point my camera in the right direction, but I’m confident with enough practice, it would be an invaluable little guy to carry on the go.

Next, I was introduced to Tiffen’s computer software, known as Dfx. It is a image filter program that emulates its signature filters for you to use to apply to your images. There is a standalone which you can load your photos to manipulate freely. Thanks to some handy masking tools you can work on on the subject or the background without severely affecting the other. If you’ve used an image editing program before (Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, etc) then the dfx will come to you natural with layers, masking, and abundant of knobs and dials in its settings. If you ever wanted to see how a photo looked with certain filters on, this program will probably have it.

Last, but certainly not least of Tiffen’s line of product that I found fascinating is the Lowel Blender LED, a lighting tool that you can use to fill in the inconsistency of indoor and outside lighting. By lighting it on the subject it can seamlessly blend the different light sources and create a smooth soft tone. Powered by two 5k and two 3k lights, they are easily adjustable to fit the room’s ambient. While this is great for those tungsten and daylight constrasts, it might a little more different if you’re using colored lights, but I’m sure some filtering as fix those. It is portable and perfect for those run-and-gun styles of production.