Beginner ND grad/ND filters

Richard Best

Richard Best

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Richard
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What ND grad/ND filters do you walk with?

I love landscape and travel photography and have been considering picking up some of these filters to try out.

Ideally I don't really want to carry more than 3 with me so wondered what people would consider "essential" to have to cover most landscape scenarios.

I was thinking Cokin as my budget is around £50. I don't want to spend too much on an experiment.

My thoughts were to have a 4 stop ND filter for use in blurring water, a 10 stop ND filter for some longer exposures on clouds for example and a 3 stop soft edge graduated filter for landscapes and correctly exposing skies. Do I really need a hard edge GND filter aswell?

This mirrors the set that photographer Elia Locardi created but without the £250 price tag.

I've seen the Cokin sets but I didn't want 3 similar filters if one could do the job well.

Does this sound okay?

Also, can anyone recommend a carry case/holder for these filters?

Thanks for any help :)

Rich
 
Welcome to the forum Rich. We're had this same question raised and discussed a few times recently if you read back through the forum and/or use the search button.

I regularly carry a set of ND screw-in filters and a set of hitech grad filters with holder, but I very rarely use the grad filters as the digital grad filters you can apply in Lightroom (with or without multiple exposure blending techniques) are far more useful. For the regular ND filters I much prefer screw-in filters, and two filter diameters cover 90% of the landscapes I shoot.
 
Thanks for your replies. I had a look over some of the previous threads and found them useful.

I was more specifically looking for advice on if the filters I've chosen cover a good range of scenarios found in landscape photography or if I need a different/wider variety.

I've recently got Lightroom and I'm trying to find my way round it. I considered maybe underexposing the photo and correcting it in Lightroom but also wanted to try grads to get as close to the real thing first time.

I hadn't considered ebay :p I'll take a look
 
Richard Best said:
Thanks for your replies. I had a look over some of the previous threads and found them useful.

I was more specifically looking for advice on if the filters I've chosen cover a good range of scenarios found in landscape photography or if I need a different/wider variety.

I've recently got Lightroom and I'm trying to find my way round it. I considered maybe underexposing the photo and correcting it in Lightroom but also wanted to try grads to get as close to the real thing first time.

I hadn't considered ebay :p I'll take a look
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Well its cheap as chips tbh but you will be able to decide if filters are the way to go or just bracket exposure and blend them in Post Processing :)
 
Richard Best said:
but also wanted to try grads to get as close to the real thing first time.
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If you want to wear that hair shirt, feel free! I'm more concerned by the end result, rather than the techniques and methods I use to achieve it.

Beware when deliberately underexposing, the most modern sensors (eg. those in the D800/D810) have excellent shadow recovery, but anything older or consumer grade will suffer from increased noise and decreased image quality if you take this too far. the technique of exposure to the right (ETTR) is useful to know with any camera (it's an established technique, search the forum or use Google for details). Personally I'd rather take multiple exposures and use a combination of masking/blending and/or tonemapping when the dynamic range exceeds the capacity of the scene to record it. Using physical graduated filters you've no control over how the filter affects foreground elements that project above the horizon.

How many lenses are you regularly shooting landscapes with? - how many filter diameters do you need to cover? I'd suggest starting with maybe a Marumi DHG ND64 screw-in ND filter sized for your largest lens and a step-up filter for any smaller diameter filters. Try the digital grads in Lightroom before splashing out on these, and watch a few tutorials so you understand how to modify a grad filter in LR to brush out areas you don't want it to apply. And with LR you can build-up your grad effect with multiple small increment adjustments to give you far more control than a single physical filter can.
 
If I'm honest, I'm not sure what I'm doing :p I had a go at photography years ago and I've only recently started to get back into it. This time I'm looking to take it more seriously and maybe even have a go at those scary manual settings :exit:

I'm not knocking what can be done in post processing. Developing the method I use is one thing I'm looking most forward too and i'm expecting a lot of varying results. But for now if I can keep it simple and just control as much as possible the light that goes into my camera, and attempt the complicated lightroom stuff later, then thats what on going for :)

My main lens is a Tamron 17-50 f/2.8. I also have an expensive wide angle lens at home somewhere but I'll have to check that later as I'm at work atm.

I'll take a look at the filter you've suggested and continue to play around in Lightroom :)
 
I think you should also consider soft-edged for landscapes or hard-edged for seascapes too. Try AEB bracketing, perhaps before splashing out on filters.
 
Richard Best said:
and attempt the complicated lightroom stuff later
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Hi Richard

I'm a relative newbie to digital photography and Lightroom etc but trust me after watching just one YouTube video on applying a grad filter to an over exposed sky in Lightroom you will be feeling it's far from complicated.

You may be feeling like I was that it was all so complicated as there is so much it can do and there is truth in that BUT watching short videos and applying things in bite sized chunks will give you the confidence.

Check out Adobe's specialist Julianne Kost videos. Very clear and very simple.

Tony
 
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