Have you ever heard of the HOYA Sparkle filters before? Me neither. But it looks like this is about to change as Hoya is investing more in marketing to push these.
Since I moved to my new studio, quite a few agencies have approached me offering collaborations. Among them, professional video, photo and broadcast supplier Holdan who distributes Hoya as well as Samyang. I already use some Hoya filters and a couple Samyang lenses. So it made sense to me to accept to discuss terms with them.
The collaboration is very open and friendly. The agency sends me the products to test and eventually review but they give me complete creative freedom. I can decide what content to produce and do it in my own terms. They don’t get to influence the output or see the content before publishing. They don’t even send me marketing material that could somehow indicate a direction for the things to say. It’s all completely open and I am expected to be fully honest in my review, which to me is the base foundation of a collab.
Hoya Sparkle filters
So, the Hoya Sparkle filters were the first product I received. They come in 2 variants, a 4x and 6x, producing stars with 4 or 6 spikes respectively. Yes, this is what these filters do. They take the lights in the frame (like lampposts for example) and turn them into fairy-like stars.
Normally, you can achieve this by closing the aperture of a lens to its minimum values. But then there is very little control over the results. They very much depend on the lens and with some lenses, like long telephoto lenses, it may not happen at all. Moreover, closing the aperture beyond F/11 or F/13 may start to introduce diffraction and affect the sharpness of a photo.
With the Hoya Sparkle filters you instead take full control.
The Video
Now, I will keep all the technical discussion for the actual review of these Hoya Sparkle filters, so let’s focus on today’s video…
Like I said, I have complete creative freedom here. So the first thing I did was film my nights out in London while testing these filters and create a short collage film. I sent this to the agency and they loved it. And so did Hoya who are now using the video in all product pages on their website as well!
So, here it is. Please enjoy and let me know your feedback in the comments section below.
Here’s the direct link in case the embed fails to load: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1xWKCKgwG4
The Hoya Sparkle filters review will come soon so don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel for this and more!
Cheers!
