Project Day 5

The project for Day 5 is to "practise using ND grad filters at sunrise or sunset. Shoot the scene with and without them and study how this affects your results."

The results of my shoots are below:

without ND grad

with ND grad 3

I think of all the tutorials so far, this is the one that shows the most dramatic results. This is the first time I've used an ND grad, I've never even got around to buying a holder for it! I really like the results though, so will be using one more often. You can really see the detail of the clouds in this shot while the foreground stays in good exposure. Not only that, but you can actually see the sunset (this is the same series of shots I took for the last tutorial), so I am quite pleased I did actually record a sunset. Normally to get this level of detail in the sky I would have to select the sky in Photoshop and adjust the levels independent of the rest of the image. In this case, however, I just tweaked the exposure (a bit underexposed) in Camera Raw and that was it. I'm now a fan of ND grads!

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Day 5: Add Filters For Effect

Day 5 of the Better Landscapes in Just 7 Days tutorial in the current issue of Practical Photography focuses on the use of the polariser and ND grad filters in landscape photography.

"Every photographer needs a little help to capture the landscape on the sensor or film. This is because you won't be able to capture the massive range of brightness and colours in many landscapes without a little help. There are many different filters available, but you really only need to use two types for 90% of landscapes - the ND grad and polariser. Both of these filters allow ou to change the colours and tones so that the camera can capture them and give you better pictures....

Polariser
Blue skies and the saturated colours of the landscape can look muted and dull in your landscape shots without a polariser filter. Using a polariser you need to rotate the filter while looking through the viewfinder as the effect changes according to the position of the filter. ... The effect on the sky is most pronounced at right angles to the sun, so if the sun is directly behind you the changes can be quite minimal.

ND Grads
Keeping detail in both the land and the sky is almost impossible in a single image without the help of an ND grad. One half of this filter is a dark grey colour, which should be positioned over the sky, while the clear area should be over the landscape.

...Rememeber that the exposure for the foreground won't be affected by the filter, so expose for this and use the right strength filter to make sure the sky is correctly exposed."

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