I am hooked to Filters

Well I am a filter designer myself. But the filters that I am talking about are those that you attach in front of the lens to moderate exposure levels and bring more detail to the shot. I did some study and found that there is an entire industry out there making thousands of filters for various effects. Even after the advent of digital photography, people find it indispensable to have nice filters. After all, you can't do any postprocessing of digital images if you don't have good data to begin with. That's where the filters come in handy. Take the neutral density filter for example. It is a must for landscape photography. If you are shooting a landscape against a well lit up sky, you'll either overexpose the sky and lose detail there or underexpose the landscape and lose detail there. Neutral density filters darken the sky and correspondingly bring out more detail there, so you can get a really good exposure. I was hooked to a photograph of Moraine Lake in Canada for the last couple of days. That photograph was too perfect (found it on www.photo.net). I was wondering how the photographer managed to capture such detail and found that he used a graduated neutral density filter (cokin) and just a regular digital camera with 8M pixels. The result was amazing and of course now I am determined to replicate that result. So I have somewhat narrowed down to buying a colkin kit, with the adapter ring, filter holder and the filter itself because this brand is cheap. People say that colkin has some color problems and is not scratch resistant. But Tiffen, Schneider and other filters cost a whole lot and spending that much on filter accessories is not currently justified although I can afford them. I really would like to make money out of photography. Ideally the hobby should pay for itself. It is all just a matter of doing it. and too many people are doing it after the advent of digital photography!

Furthermore, I found this lens adapter to add to my Canon G3 so that I may use the polarizing filter along with it. I have always wanted to do that and finally found out today that there is this adapter which will enable me to do it. But I don't have another polarizing filter. I would have to keep changing the filter between the two cameras I have. I do slide shots these days and have pretty much forgotten about color negatives. I think they will become extinct soon.