Welding videos

[tonyfoale]

I wanted to make some video shots of MIG welding for a tool making video but I had never done this before and I didn't want to destroy my camera. I do not know how easy it is to burn the sensor.
I thought that for safety sake I needed to hold a welding helmet filter in front of the lens. I did not not want to spend much time on this and to mount a typical rectangular filter looked to be too much work, but then I wondered about the circular lenses from gas welding goggles. I quickly discovered that two filters gave about the same light attenuation as a typical electric welding filter. My luck was running well and got even better when I discovered that the round filters were a perfect fit into a 52mm camera UV filter that I had from my film photography days. My camera lens has a 67 mm thread so I made a stack of reduction rings from 67 mm down to 52 mm, installed the UV filter followed by the two welding filters also followed by a welding UV filter.
It worked, the videos came out nicely and the camera still functions.

Click thumbnail for full size images.
The components.


Filters stacked. Some plasticine holds it altogether.


Fitted to the camera.

I expect that there are several people on this forum who have videoed welding and I would love to hear how others have done it. Videos on the net seem to vary a lot regarding quality and brightness so I suspect that some people just use a naked camera ????????