Alex Wise Photography

The best pur­chases I have made for my cam­era, have been the Canon 10–22 and my Cokin grad­u­ated neu­tral den­sity fil­ters. I thought I’d just touch on how come they are so handy and how some­times the viewer may be mis­lead into think­ing the shot may of required alot of edit­ing to achieve that effect when real­is­ti­cally it was achieved in-camera with­out photoshopping.

A very pop­u­lar tool in any land­scape pho­tog­ra­phers kit is the grad­u­ated neu­tral den­sity fil­ter. When look­ing at land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy the aver­age user doesn’t realise that many shots these days are com­posed util­is­ing grad­u­ated neu­tral den­sity fil­ters. For the some­what more expe­ri­enced pho­tog­ra­pher it may be assumed that the pho­to­graph was com­posed and later dig­i­tally edited in pho­to­shop. This belief comes as a result of the dif­fi­cul­ties which pho­tog­ra­phers have when com­pos­ing a shot in cam­era. With­out a grad­u­ated neu­tral den­sity fil­ter, the user instead focuses on a point in the shot to gain a cor­rect expo­sure. If you do this to the land of the shot then another for the sky, it will dif­fer. There­fore when tak­ing the pho­to­graph the sky may be over exposed while the land will be as hoped. This is where grad­u­ated neu­tral den­sity fil­ters come into the equa­tion. Included below is two shots, as you can see the first is with the dark area of the neu­tral den­sity fil­ter fac­ing down whilst in the sec­ond the top end is fac­ing up. I must note that these are ND grad­u­ated fil­ters which dif­fer to other ND fil­ters in that they slowly fade from dark to clear, as a gra­di­ent effect if you will. A strong neu­tral den­sity fil­ter instead is just dark and does not fade to clear. For my gen­eral shoot­ing of pho­tog­ra­phy I much pre­fer to use grad­u­ated fil­ters over strong/solid neu­tral den­sity fil­ters as I find strong is more appeal­ing for water­fall shots dur­ing the day where you require a long expo­sure how­ever this isn’t as much the case for sun­rise or sun­set water­scape photography.

As you can see with the sec­ond shot above, the fil­ter adds mood to the sky whilst the land is prop­erly main­tained and not as under-exposed as the sky may be. Such appeals to land­scape pho­tog­ra­phers so they can prop­erly under exposed their fore­ground sub­ject whilst the sky is not affected and doesn’t become washed out. Below are a few recent exam­ples of when the fil­ter has enabled me to get a shot with ease with­out hav­ing to worry about fix­ing the shot in pho­to­shop. Speak­ing of which, I find the fil­ter min­imises alot of pho­to­shop work and usu­ally my pho­tographs only require minor sharp­en­ing and other minor adjust­ments which save time and is how pho­tog­ra­phy should be (That could open a can of worms..)

One thing about each shot above is that the fore­ground (land) is not overly dark and the viewer can see the detail on the rocks. If the shot was taken with­out fil­ters and for exam­ple the sky was exposed then the land would be very dark and would not retain detail. The same would apply if the land was exposed and as a result the shot would not have the sky as you see in the shots above. Instead the user would have to com­pen­sate and aim for a darker image so the sky was not blown out (under-exposed) whilst the fore­ground was some­what exposed. This leaves the image being quite dark and advanced users con­sult pho­to­shop through expo­sure stacking.Photoshopping the sky to make the expo­sure look more nat­ural is a com­pletely dif­fer­ent story. For any­one won­der­ing I’ll quickly explain how I would maybe do this (I haven’t done it before so can’t com­ment from expe­ri­ence) but here goes

1. Open both images in sep­a­rate win­dows in photoshop
2. Set one image as the work place and then drag the other image into the work­place to cre­ate another layer
3. Make this new layer a vec­tor mask
4. Select the paint­brush and press D to make the colours black and white
5. Begin draw­ing on the area which you want to bring out
6. Play with the opac­ity to make it more natural

But when dodg­ing or doing the above be care­ful not to bring the area out too much. I’ve seen count­less pho­tographs where the scene is quite dark because the sun­set has just fin­ished but then there is rocks in the fore­ground which look like they are exposed with 1pm sunlight.

But mov­ing on, the equip­ment I use for these shots can be pur­chased at bhpho­tovideo. I use the more expen­sive Cokin Z Pro which in com­par­i­son to the P series, is a lit­tle big­ger which greater suits wide-angle shoot­ing to min­imise vignetting. There are other brands avail­able such as Lee and Hitech but I’ve never seen them so can’t really offer any advice but have heard good reports. The Z-Pro range is worth the extra pen­nies but I must warn you that they must be treated care­fully as I have dropped fil­ters in the past and chipped them.

Cokin Z-Pro neu­tral den­sity fil­ters are avail­able at Ado­rama. Also avail­able are the Lee neu­tral den­sity fil­ter kit which are more expen­sive but appar­ently have less colour cast issues.

Hope that helps.