Nd grad filters

ikeeling

ikeeling

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Ian
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I'm contemplating buying a set of nd grads but something has been bugging me. How do these work?
Aside from the obvious, allowing you to expose the foreground for longer so you don't lose the sky, how do you go on if say you are photographing a building which cuts vertically straight through the image? In this instance you could end up with a well exposed sky but a underexposed and well exposed split on the subject.
 
ikeeling said:
I'm contemplating buying a set of nd grads but something has been bugging me. How do these work?
Aside from the obvious, allowing you to expose the foreground for longer so you don't lose the sky, how do you go on if say you are photographing a building which cuts vertically straight through the image? In this instance you could end up with a well exposed sky but a underexposed and well exposed split on the subject.
Click to expand...
There's no way around that, unfortunately.
ND grads can only do what they can do, which is provide a straightforward exposure gradient across an image.
 
I thought so much, I assume that in this instance if you were shooting a building you would just have to blend different exposures of the same shot.
 
ikeeling said:
I thought so much, I assume that in this instance if you were shooting a building you would just have to blend different exposures of the same shot.
Click to expand...

You could, or ideally if it's a place you can get to relatively easily you'd wait until the light is right for the kind of shot you want. If you're doing a dedicated photo trip to a city maybe try make a bit of a plan beforehand of what you want to shoot and try be at the right places at the right time of day to get what you want. It's not always easy or even possible, but a bit of planning can really help you to get what you're after without having to try make the most of a less than ideal situation. :)
 
ikeeling said:
I thought so much, I assume that in this instance if you were shooting a building you would just have to blend different exposures of the same shot.
Click to expand...

Yeah that's all you can do when there is a big disruption to your ND horizon
 
The alternatives are to use negative film, which can cope with a wider subject brightness range, or use a tripod and take multiple exposures which you can then merge in Photoshop to allow you to retain detail in both foreground and sky. It's not always the sky, of course; I have a (digital) image of a woodland scene where the upper half is correctly exposed and the foreground flowers are burned out.

Edit to add: a tripod may not always be needed if you have a steady hand and reasonable margins; there is at least one digital camera that will automatically take multiple exposures and blend them in camera. I can't recall which, but I did see a review and examples recently. Probably a compact...
 
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Your camera manual will tell you if your camera can blend multiple images. Mine does but I have not used it a lot as I'd rather use separate software to do this. As Stephen has said it is quite possible to take multiple exposures, hand held and blend them. For multiple exposures I have the camera set to take the shot with the longest exposure first and shortest exposure last as I think I will be most steady during the first exposure.

Dave
 
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