Greetings all, I am a welding Instructor based in Idaho and after thinking long and hard about it our department bought a Nikon D3300 for the purpose of filming welding tutorials. We chose a lower end camera from the Nikon range thinking that if it worked well we could invest in something better in the long run. But that aside, on with the question...
Welding and getting close to welding can be a pretty nasty environment, so with that in mind we would like to film in close, but from a distance. By that i mean we would like to keep the camera out of harms way... say 6 feet away from the process, but be able to see a quarter filling the screen. We would like to get close up shots of the weld puddle from a safe distance. Now, we have seen all sorts of lens options online, and many have videos showing massive long range shots etc... but we havent seen one yet that shows the minimum focus length on some of the larger lens (by larger i mean longer, ie larger numbers . We bought the 2 lens kit including the standard and 55-200 lenses and obviously they do not give the magnification required, i mean they could if i got in close but we dont really want to melt the camera lol
So in a nutshell, what sort of a lens or lens combo would alow us to be 5-6' away but be able to focus in on a quarter full screen?
Secondly, we are looking at a number of options to counteract the brightness of the welding arc... We obviously have straight welding glass available, as well as reactive autodarkening lenses available, and we are looking at various ways of attaching these lenses to the camera for various tests... Also, we have been looking at ND filters and even purchased a variable filter in a hope to find the right sort of density we would need for a solid single density filter, but the graduating marks around the ring, apart from being out of alignment do not identify the density directly, plus the variables have that horrible X pattern of darkness... so we werent able to determine a usable density value. Has anyone used a solid ND filter to show the weld pool effectively? Or does anyone have knowledge of what sort of range should we be looking at getting? As in ND400? ND1000?
Any advise would be welcomed