To prove the point, where others have not provided any, those are actually long-exposure water shots I do apreciate.
As much as anything they are not over-milked, and the exposure duration is subtly chosen to retain detail in the clouds and the waves, not completely streak and milk them; the effect does add to the shot.
And does provide support for the suggestion, less is often more.
As an examples of 'effect' that enhances the subject, rather than an effect in substitute for subject, I do like.
And supports the skinning-cats conundrum, that there's never only 'one' right way to do anything.
__________________________________________________________
Moving on; and the debate between filters, grad-filters and exposure merging, withe mention of HDR....
HDR is just a more automated means of exposure merging, which has to be said has been done as a Dark-Room technique, from two or three or more original exposures since almost the dawn of photography, let alone the advent of 'film!
For those not familiar; in pioneering age, when oft home brewed photographic emulsions, smeared on glass plates, often lacked an awful lot of sensitivity what-so-ever, and 25ASA if it had been known, of would have been considered 'fast'...
It was quite common, if not usual, for a photgrapher to make three seperate exposures of a subject; one for the high-lights, one for the shaddows and one for the mid-tones.
Each of these exposures, probably 'plates', would then be exposed individually onto a single piece of printing paper, the areas of the final image to be kept 'burned in' to the print paper, with whatever exposure was needed; the areas to be saved for the other exposures would be 'held back' or 'dodged' with masking to preserve the print paper for the exposure that caught most detail in that region; the seperate exposures 'merged' in the printing.
In later years with the popular adoption of smaller negatives and the use of enlargers, this became even more common, along with 'dodging and burning' holding back or burning in specific areas of the print-paper to effect localised exposure control from a single negative.
Entering the digital-domain quarter of a century ago, when it was still in it's infancy; post-process wasn't called 'Photo-Shop' or 'Post-Process', it was called the Digital-Dark-Room..... And I saw little difference to using techniques of Post-Process as little different to those I had used in my Dark-Room....
I just didn't have to dissapear under the stairs for long hours, choking on hypo fumes and wast so much expensive paper along the way! (given the power of 486 computers of the era, even first generation 'Pentium' processors when they came along, MIGHT have been a bit faster.... but still!)
Long before any-one created an automated 'HDR merging' one-touch digi-diddle, I created shaped masks in an photo-editor, that defined areas of a frame, into which I would paste parts of one exposure, then another, probably based on an inversion of the first shaped mask, to paste another exposure.
This IS exposure merging, and HDR rendering, at a base level, just doing what I had formerly done in the dark room with snoots and wands or bunny-rabbit hands under the enlarger lens!
It is absolutely NOTHING particularly 'new' or novel.
Diving into Digital Domain, though, just like doing it all manually in the dark-room, is the level of control and accuracy the user may have or exploit.
Take for example the 'niggle' using a conventional grey-grad, where your scene doesn't conveniently have a straight horizon, and holding back the sky, you will have trees or buildings cutting the horizon line, and being under exposed under the darker portion of the grad.
Before the digi-Dark room....it was not unknown for photographers to make thier own filters from cut sheet, 'gels', particularly for B&W, but more oalso from clear OHP acetates, which they would then 'shade' with a felt-tip pen to create a 'shaped' grad or ND filter that held back or completely masked portions of thier scene on the negative; they may even have 'exposure merged' removing the shaped filter mid exposure, or fired the shutter two or three times, using different shaped or masked filters to get a single overall exposure!
Clever stuff! I never managed it! But other's did! And iot shows the blurry bopundry between 'in-camera' and 'post-process' going back to the days of the pioneers!
In the difference with digital, it is interesting to note, how many HDR merges, show two or three obviouse individial exposures, made at different times.
This is particularly noticeable in HDR merges of lakes or beaches, where waves are super-imposed on top of each other, often traveling in slightly different directions!
Hmmm! That looks 'odd'!
Often takes a bit of squinting to figure out what's going on; but it very often comes down to the software being left to make decisions, photographers of old made for themselves; picking the regions of any individual exposure they chose to keep in the final display 'print', where they would make irregular shaped masks, or manuall dodge & burn strategic areas of the print area from individual exposures; not just looking at tables of numbers and averaging out values for individual pixels.
This then starts to display where the 'one-touch' automation of modern post process 'packages', is not actually providing the photographer with any greater degree of control or ability, but actually taking it away from them, urging use of a one-touch automated filter, suggesting that its the best or indeed 'only' way to achieve a result, let alone an 'effect', that they could, with a little more know-how and some time and patience achieve far more successfully, and with a much greater subtelty, even in the photo-editing package that contains the one-touch probably HDR 'effect', let alone an old fashioned dark-room.
Its back to skinning cats; and the many ways that any final image might be achieved, with any 'effect' exploited within it.
There's no real right or wrong answer as far as using or not using lens end filters.
Polarizers are noteably a special case where what they do to light entering the lens, cant be replicated or mimmicked in any post-process.
Grads? As said, not always the most apropriate to use 'on-camera' where horizons are broken by scenary. Multi-exposure merging can have as much validity in different circumstances. IF you want or need to effect localised exposure control. But old masters did it pre- or even 'during' capture with specially prepared filters or gels.
Big-Stoppa type Neutral Density filters? Bit more muteable.
Understandable in Digi-Domain, where the ISO sensitivity of the electric eye, is not so 'slow' to start with.
In film, commercial, over the counter film, even towards the end of it being available on the high-street; 100ASA and 200ASA were the most likely consumer film speeds; but slide was commonly available as low as perhaps 64ASA rating, B&W even lower down to maybe 25ASA, the box instructions often offering advice that could be exposed and procesed maybe two stops either side, as anything from 100ASA down to 6ASA!
I think even my first Digi-Compact, almost 20-years ago, had a selectable ISO settings of 100 & 400! And I haven't come accross anything more modern that goes any lower... higher, yes, a lot higher, but rarely any lower.
This would beg at least 4-stops of ND filter to get down to an equivilent exposure range, just of late era 'slow' film; and even more to get down into the range of incredibly slow emulsions on early plate cameras that begged inordinately long shutter speeds.
An high Stop rating ND than would tend to be the most feasible way to get down to that sort of exposure range.. BUT does beg the query why you would want to?
On halide emulsion, it was usually a limitation of the emulsion that they were so slow, and begged such techniques as exposure merging or focus stacking to over-come some of this inadequecy; in the studio, posing clamps were often needed to keep sitters still for the reletively long, maybe 10second, exposures the emulsion demanded.
Where slower emulsions were most often utilised, was NOT necesserily to allow slower shutter-speeds, in fact slower shutter's and consequent motion blur were still something to try and avoid; but slower sensitivity film was employed for finer grain halide structure, and a greater tonal range (as distinct from dynamic range!).
A legacy handed down to digital in the idea of Low ISO for less 'noise', which is not strictly true and a very large over simplification.
Lower ISO doesn't deliver less 'noise'. It just means less signal aplification to see any meaningful difference between shades, and in the digital sampling of those, and thresholds set between levels, it DOESN'T actually translate as a more 'faithful' or 'accurate' digital description of the viewed scene...
Adding a big-stoppa filter infront of the lens to dim the scene, can then actually make matters worse for the electrickery, providing a much dimmer image for it to look at and try and decide what number to ascribe to each shade, and hence crate more computer-confusion or 'noise'.
The big stopper is used for photographing eclipses and removing moving pedestrians and traffic from streetscapes, church interiors, etc..
This is actually one of the few legitimate reasons for employing a Big-Stoppa. ISTR manufactueres issuing some warnings after I think it was the 2001 solar eclipse, of the intensity being able to burn out un-filtered digi-sensors?
Loosing pedestrians in street-scapes, though made me LOL, remembering accademic excersise of looking at early 1900's street shots, and being asked to suggest what time of day they were taken.
Lack of shoppers and pedestrians in a busy Chigago street or similar, begged suggestion it was taken on a Sunday or after closing time; but told to look more closely at the sky, it wasn't white because it was an over-cast day; it was white because the exposure was so long that the clouds had smeared right accross the frame, and so had the sun!
They were often two or three hour long exposures, during which crowds of pedestrians could have passed by and not hung around long enough to leave an image on the plate!
But as Long-Lens suggests, you can remove moving elements in a scene with multiple exposures, and post capture merging; whether you do that via HDR or stitching, or selective masking and over-laying, as you might have in the halide dark-room, its ways of skinning cats, and what may be more or less apropriate or easy.
For a dark interior, like a church, likely with a much more brightly back-lit stained glass window?
You would probably want to hold that back a little to saturate the colour of the glass; but at the same time, you would probably want to brighten up the dimmer interior to get some detail in the shaddows.
Depends on your intent, really, but doesn't instantly scream of a situation that begs a big-stoppa, which would likely make the interior even dimmer, and might suggest some more involved means of local contrast control, probably utilusing exposure merging, to get seperate exposures for the brightly lit window, the dimly lit interior and the mid-tones inbetween. Need not be an 'automatic' one touch post process filter or manipulation, either, and from a sequence of perhaps a dozen shots, you could with exposure merging, whether traditionally under the enlarger, or as contemprary, in digi-dark room, using layers and masks, effect whatever result you set out to; whether that's just to remove people, or avoid them streaking, or to get detail in the dark corners as well as bright stained glass... up to you...
Point is a filter MIGHT be of some help.... post process may be of some help; they are not as PulButler says, mutually exclusive, you can use filters, you can use Post-Process, individually or in combination.
The trick is in knowing what you want to achieve, and picking the 'tool' most able to help you achieve that.
They are just 'tools'. I could pick a hammer out of my tool box, or I could pick a screw-driver; they both do different things, but I can hammer two bits of wood together with nails, or I can screw them together with screws... end result may be little or no different.. but if I try hammerig screws into a bit of wood or using the screw-driver to bash in nails... pretty sure I'm not going to get the best bit of wood-work I could!
And to continue the analogy; you dont give a three year-old a set of Snap-On spanners for christmas and expect them to build a Farari! You give them a Bob-The-Builder tool belt and let them bash bricks and poke the dog! IF they make a ferari, then serendipty is at work! Get the kid a "My First Woodwork" set for Christmas and see where he goes with it! But let him play and find out where the screwdriver is more use than the hammer, and where he needs both; just dont expect a Chippendale wardrobe from his straight off the bat!