Lee filters problems

[LongLensPhotography]

I tested my Lee kit (0.6 and 0.9 soft + 0.6 hard + holder + WA adapter) with 24-70mm yesterday in Clevedon just before the sunset. I quickly looked through the photos and I must say I am not overly impressed.

As I was shooting into the setting sun and I saw a lot of ghosting, clearly more than I would expect normally. When they put the lights on the pier at dusk, I had doubled and trippled images of these lamps. Clearly my old trick with dark wallet yielded me much cleaner images with slightly more effort.

Furthermore I am not convinced the nomral soft ND grads are the way to go for the sunset over the sea (hard may be better but still not ideal?). The sky above quite quickly became very dark, while the horizon was hardly darkened at all. There is also an issue of burnt sun reflection in the water. I would like to hear some oppinions how to do this the best way possible.

Also, would a scratch on one of the filters make a huge impact on IQ? What about stacking of 0.6+0.9 together?

I could post some photos tonight if needed.

 

[HoppyUK]

Lee grads are uncoated resin aren't they? Bound to be a bit flarey if you point them at the sun, and ghosts are to be expected if you've got bright lights against a dark background. It's a reflection off the sensor bouncing back from the rear of the filter. Multicoating helps but that's hard to come by in grads. I think Lee are as good as you can get in square filter systems.

Sure, if you get a scratch in the wrong place that create a bad flare patch and stacking filters will only make things worse.

There's no denying that HDR technique is much better than grads for this kind of thing but you've onbviously got to do the work in post processing.

Sorry

 

[The Matt]

Furthermore I am not convinced the nomral soft ND grads are the way to go for the sunset over the sea (hard may be better but still not ideal?). The sky above quite quickly became very dark, while the horizon was hardly darkened at all. There is also an issue of burnt sun reflection in the water. I would like to hear some oppinions how to do this the best way possible.

That is always a problem with soft grads. Push one of them down a bit, it'll darken the sea but help deal with the sunny reflection and your light horizon. Ideally I'd want to try one hard and one soft grad together.