As a landscape photographer, I'm often asked
why I use ND grads rather than HDR or High Dynamic Range.
Although both techniques allow for control of highlight and shadow detail,
in my experience,
ND grads tend to give a much more natural result.
In this video, I'd like to show you how ND grads work.
The search for the picture is in many ways
the essence of landscape photography.
In most landscape situations, if you want to record a wide scene,
the camera and the human eye do not see in the same way.
The brain is the principal instrument of vision and is a processor.
It tells us that everything looks right, however dark or bright it is.
The camera, on the other hand is a light-recording machine.
Sometimes, the range of light is too great for the camera to record.
So graduation filters are the foundation of landscape photography,
especially when the sky forms a significant part of the image.
That's what I'm going to demonstrate in these next examples.
There are different ways of deciding which filters to use.
You need to meter the scene
and most enthusiast photographers prefer to use manual settings.
That makes the process of choosing the filter easier.
First, you point your camera at the landscape, avoiding the sky.
I'm using matrix metering,
and it's giving me 1/100sec at f/10.
If I point it at the sky,
it gives me 1/250sec at f/10.
So that tells me a relatively light, soft filter
will work with this image.
LEE ND grads come in different strengths and different transitions,
from hard to soft.
For this picture, I'm going to use a two-stop or 0.6 soft grad.
Once it's in situ, I take the picture.
That looks OK, but...
I have a feeling the hard filter may be even better.
And sure enough, it gives a moodier look.
It emphasises the point that using filters
is not just about achieving a technically correct result,
it's also a matter of interpretation of the light.
The foreground here is quite bright
and the cliff in the background is very dark.
So this gives me an opportunity to use the filter in an unusual way.
I'm going to use a two-stop 0.6 soft graduated filter, and invert it.
It darkens the foreground
and allows me to expose correctly for the cliff in the background.
The exposure range in this composition is very wide.
It's at least four stops
It's a strange composition,
but I like it enough to want to try and get it to work.
The easiest solution is to use a three-stop
graduated filter over the sky.
The sky is on the right
and the cliff is on the left.
The system allows you to rotate the filter 360 degrees within the holder.
I'm going to use Live View
as it allows me to see the effect of the filter.
While it's not perfect, it helps overall,
and the mood of the picture is complete.
This example illustrates a more advanced technique.
The high dynamic range in this scene
would be very tricky for a single grad alone.
I'll get around it by using two grads.
The first is a two-stop soft grad on the first guide rail,
which leaves the bottom quarter of the image uncovered.
The filters helps to smooth the central zone
but the sky is still too bright.
So for that, I need a two-stop hard grad
which goes into the second guide rail.
That holds back the sky sufficiently.
The final result is almost seamless,
which is the whole point of using these filters.