ND grads - soft or hard that's the question

In a word - soft grads are suited to most scenes where the horizon is undulating whilst hard grads are suited to scenes such as seascapes where the horizon is level.

With regards to full frame - there was an in depth thread on this recently regarding the transition of the filter against the sensor size but don't get hung up on that.
 
Ok, what I should have mentioned was what I would like to photograph with my new grads, I would like to photograph more sunrises, sunsets, some seascapes and photograph long exposures with my lee big stopper (10 stop nd), is soft still best to go for most of this photography I'd like to do?
 
As Phil says, it depends on how much the land part of the shot penetrates the sky part of the shot. If there's a clear and reasonably horizontal horizon then you can get some dramatic shots with a hard grad but if there's stuff like trees and hilltops pushing up into the sky a hard grad can produce a pronounced dark area in the boundary so a soft grad is more suited.

It sounds like you're buying either one or the other and in my experience you really need both.
 
I have a 0.6 (2 stop) hard, and 0.9 (3 stop) soft and hard - seems to get me out of most situations. I used to have a 0.6 soft, but I found I preferred a heavier soft so there was more stops in the graduation as I also like my skies a little darker and punchier.
 
I went with a set of hard grads.

At the time I bough them I went through the unscientific process of noting any shot that I saw that declared the use of an ND grad and noted whether it was a hard or soft type.

I found that hard grads were used in a much higher percentage of the photos.

Deeply 'unscientific' but did give me an indication of the usability of hard grads. I don't regret purchasing mine and have found few instances where I wished that I had a set of soft grads.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top