You have small children that will want to touch your lens, even then it is debatable. Modern lens are coated and it takes a bit of work to scratch them. And that is really all a UV filter does, protects your lens. In my opinion a much better protection is a lens hood. There are plenty of stories of dropped lenses with lens hoods taking most if not all the damage.

Lens Hoods: protect the front element of your lens, eliminates flare and stray light and can upon dropping absorb a good bit of the impact(hopefully). Lens Hoods.

Circular Polarizer: The only filter I feel one truly needs is a circular polarizer.  In my Circular polarizer post I make that statement that it is the only filter whose effects cannot be recreated in Photoshop / post-processing.  This isn’t entirely true.  The next two filters will keep help keep sections from “blow-out” when the area is so bright that there is no recoverable data.  No amount of post-process will recover data from areas completely blown-out.

Graduated Neutral Density Filters: Imagine a piece of glass, heavily tinted at the top and gradually getting clearer towards the bottom.  If you are going to be doing lots of sunsets/sunrises you may want to look at a Graduated Neutral Density Filters.  Wikipedia has a great write-up but basically they allow you to even out the difference between a bright sky and a dark landscape.

Neutral Density Filters: If you love flowing water photos, like I do, you may want to invest in a Neutral Density filter or two which evenly and cleanly cuts down the amount of light reaching your sensor. It is a little ironic that we spend so much money on cameras with increasingly higher ISO sensitivity and software to remove noise from high ISO images and there are times where you can actually have to much light.  When you want 8-15 second exposures at times other than dawn and dusk or you want a wider aperture under full sun a ND filter can be handy.  You may read this and be thinking that your lens offers f/32 or some other ridiculously small aperture.  At very small apertures your images are going to suffer from diffraction which decreases the image quality.

Related posts:

1. Q: Why do you need a Circular Polarizer?
2. Recommended Lenses [Canon]

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