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Whether 'tis nobler on the lens to suffer the spots and rubs of outrageous contamination, or to take precautions and end them. To filt, perchance to ghost...
We'll leave the Prince of Denmark rubbing at the front of his zoom lens with the hem of his kirtle and proceed to the Nikon cabinet at Murray Street and look for a new Nikon Arcrest filter. It will be designated a protection filter, but a lot of us will think of it as a UV filter - probably inaccurately. Old habits die hard - and UV or Skylight filters were the commonality of the film era. Before you had one you felt naked - after it was on you stopped worrying about the front element of the lens and transferred your anxiety to the front face of the filter.
To be honest, you still made scratches, but you shifted them one glass surface forward. And when you had caused enough damage with cheap cleaning tissues and over-vigorous scrubbing, you could change the filter over for a fresh one.
The sea-side shooters actually did some good for themselves - salt spray was kept away from the lens glass. Of course it worked its way into the mechanism of the camera by the body, but the images you took all had better contrast before the body seized up. The B/W workers could treat themselves to a vast variety of filters in different colours and fiddle with contrast almost as well as modern digital shooters can do in the camera menu. There was an industrial trade in filters and good deal of lore and mystery about them. Everyone knew a special filter that would be better than all others and some people were quite secretive with their information.
Well, that went with digital. The amount of fussing one can do with menu settings far exceeds what could be loaded into a film chamber or screwed onto the front of a lens. The most people use is a plain glass filter with some sort of anti-reflective coating. Don't feel bad - you have not lost out by this - you can always ad effects later in post-processing.
Plain glass protection is often thought of in terms of salt spray - deservedly. We live next to an ocean and there is a sea breeze nearly every day. Material carried onto the front surface of the lens will degrade performance in nearly all instance - and the only remedy is to prevent it or pretend the results are art and that you meant to do that. If you're not a good liar, get a protection filter.
You will also exclude grit, pollen, and dog noses... Your fingerprints will sully a filter as easily as a lens, but the filter will yield to cleaning with Len Cleanse a lot easier than the curved lens.
Do I practice what I preach? Sometimes. Outside on holiday or down the seaside I do screw on plain glass filter - as much out of habit as anything. In the studio I remove it - and so far have not accidentally speared the lens on anything. I think there is less flare from side lights when I do this, but then I need to remember the lens hoods as well.
Look - if you have a new Nikon lens, get a new Arcrest filter and put your mind at ease. You'll not regret it.
