Spring is finally here…

…and about time too!

I don't know about you, but I can't remember a winter that's hung in there so tenaciously - I was beginning to think that this was the new normal now - cold/wet/grim/snow/frost - it's like we only have one season now!

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a woodland site for a future shoot - I was just hoping that it was dry and maybe I'd get some light shafts between trees - that kind of thing. I parked up and wandered into the gloom and was confronted with a wonderful carpet of early spring blooms - wood anemonies covered the ground and as the tree cover was mixed pines and Beech, the leaf canopy was still bare - plenty of light was filtering in. It was as if Spring had been happening in secret and I'd blundered into it accidentally!

The image above was made up from 2 exposures merged together for the foreground and sky. It was so low down, I had to lie on the floor with my tripod laid over on my camera bag and fired with a cable release.

So - make the most of these fleeting displays - if you're lucky enough to be need a site with bluebells, they'll be in bloom about now and wild garlic will be in flower within the next 2 weeks - blink and you'll miss it. We've all been hunkered down for months - seize the day and get in amongst it for some great spring images!

Prime candidate

…or why you need a 50mm prime lens in your life!

About 6 months or so ago, I was thinking about getting a lens upgrade and started reading reviews and articles to see what was available and applicable to my needs. There's a bewildering array of glass out there and for a beginner, it all pretty much looks the same - just more or less expensive!

I'd already researched a wide angle lens that would suit my needs, so I started looking at other focal lengths and time after time I read in articles that a good fast 50mm prime is the must have lens. As this would pretty much replace the longer focal length of my kit zoom and I was planning to get into food photography, this seemed ideal! I had some Amazon vouchers burning a hole - and smacked down an order for a mid range Nikkor f1.8 prime.

The f number is important when it comes to prime lenses as this opens the door to all sorts of creative possibilities with depth of field blur when you use them wide open at their largest aperture. The smaller the f number - the bigger the aperture and so consequently - the bigger the price! At around £150 - the f 1.8G seemed like a good mid range purchase and as the f1.4 was nearly twice the cost - I settled for that.

The benefits to buying a prime lens are many:

• The focal length is fixed, so you don't get any (or not as much) chromatic lens aberration in comparison with a zoom. As they have to cover a range of focal lengths, zooms tend to suffer a drop in quality as a compromise, so colour fringing and distortion are greater. With less moving parts, the image quality of a prime if far better.
• Primes offer a much lower maximum f number that you are able to get from a zoom at a fraction of the cost. The lowest aperture on my kit zoom was 3.5 but this climbs to 5.6 as you zoom out and if you want a really fast zoom you have to pay well over a grand to get anywhere near f2.5. A 50mm prime gives you a great maximum aperture for a 10th of the cost and it's great quality glass.
• As there's no zoom option - you are forced to think about positioning your camera in order to get the composition you want. This sounds like a massive down side but it's actually quite liberating in practice and is a great way to force you to consider what's in the view finder and how you can improve things.

The f1.8G is a really nicely built lens - it feels solid and professional, and comes with a bayonet fit lens hood and soft pouch, which are nice additions. Controls are minimal - there's a chunky focus ring that feels nice in the hand, a rudimentary focus scale and a manual/AF switch. Other than that, you just fit it and move your feet to zoom in and out. it feels nice in the hand and looks "right" on the camera body - don't know why - just does!

I found the lack of any image stabilization odd at first, and spend a fair while shooting with the lens and getting really disappointing results - I had camera shake every time I shot hand held and due to the crop factor of putting a true 50mm lens an an APS-C body - the focal length I was actually getting on the sensor is 75mm, so the lens is too long to use indoors generally. I began to wonder what all the hype was about and set it aside for a while - at least it was cheap!

Recently, I've been getting into food and ingredients photography, as as subject I could shoot for stock libraries - one of the main reasons I bought a camera in the first place was to broaden my stock image portfolio - I'd already been contributing vector illustrations to i-stock and shutterstock for a few years. As I started planning shots and images, the 50mm lens came into it's own - it's the ideal glass for food imagery, due to the great depth of field blur (or Bokeh) if affords, and shooting from a tripod, camera shake isn't an issue. I've also recently bought a great speedlight flash, and this works great with the prime for all hand held shooting.

What I've found, is I've had to learn how to work with the lens to get a good image rather than just relying on the bolt on lens widgets. Images need to be composed well to begin with as there's no option to zoom in apart from moving the camera closer. I had trouble with the auto focus initially and found that manual focus was easier to use. I've now worked out that the AF option works great but doesn't like the camera to be moving.

It's been a learning curve, but in the end I think this lens has forced me to be a better photographer and maybe that's why we all need one! A 50mm lens offers basic photography in it's most accessible form and when you learn how to use it correctly, you'll love the images it makes - you need one in your life - fact!

As usual - if you're enjoying these posts, do let me know with a comment - I'd love to hear from you! Keep shooting!

Experimental Dark Glass…

…or how to make your own 10 stop ND filter for under one 10th the price of a Lee's filters "Big Stopper"

Off the back of my last post where I discussed Neutral Density filters, I finished by discussing the possibility of making your own 10 (or more) stop filter for a fraction of the cost of a Big Stopper. I'd first seen the idea in a magazine, where the idea of using welding glass was explored as an alternative filter material. It was a great idea, but looked a bit clumsy and difficult to use. It did start me thinking though, and I came up with a more elegant and user friendly version that will be far easier to use in the field, without fear of breaking the glass or cutting yourself.

In the original article, they bought a large sheet of weld lens and attached this to the front of their lens with a filter holder ring, by taping the ring to the glass using duck tape. It definitely worked, but the risk of getting a cut was pretty high and spinning the glass pane onto the filter thread has to be pretty tricky. I set to thinking how this could be done better, and came up with this refinement of the original concept:

You will need the following items:

• 1 pane of glass welding lens (for fitting into a welder's mask)
• 1 Cokin P type filter holder
• 1 adapter ring to fit the end thread diameter of your lens
• 1 roll of black (or dark coloured) self adhesive foam weather stripping from a DIY store

1. The lens glass

This is available in a variety of different darkness strengths to suit the type of welding that you would need it for. In the original article they went for a "10" strength piece. I bought 2 pieces from ebay - one "8" strength and one "13" strength so I can experiment with which works best.

You can get these lenses in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but I got this idea when I found a supplier that had lenses cut with one width of 84mm - the exact size to fit into a Cokin P holder. My 2 lenses were £1.39 each - what a bargain! If you try and look through this glass, it's so dark, you can only make out light sources - so it'll give a really long exposure.

2. The holder

This is a standard plastic Cokin copy holder - the kind with 3 filter slots and the rebate for a polarizing filter at the back. The weld lens grass is a great match for the width - the only problem is, the glass is thicker than a standard perspex filter, so it won't slot straight in - you'll need to do some minor surgery (don't panic - nothing complex). I got this holder for £1 on ebay - nice and cheap!

The holder slots have molded in springs that stop the filters from slipping out when you slot them in (the curved bits in the centre) so on each side you need to remove one of the fins from between slots 1 and 2 - to make one double width slot. You can see here, the fin furthest from the front has been cut out. I used a scalpel for this and if you're patient, and keep scoring gently, you'll be able to snap out the fins neatly on both sides, leaving a slot that is now too big for the glass - that's where the foam comes in.

3. The foam strip

 When using a really dark filter to get a super-long exposure, it's important that no light is able to leak around the glass and enter the front of the lens, spoiling the exposure. On a Big Stopper, there is foam attached to the back to stop light leaks, so I've devised a system that takes care of this and ensures that the glass lens stays snug in the holder and doesn't slip out.

By using foam weather stripping - available from all DIY stores, I made a foam rubber gasket, attached to the holder that prevents all light leaks and holds the glass firm - here's how it's done:

 The weather stripping comes on a roll like this, and already has the adhesive on one side. I found a black roll as it made more sense bearing in mind it's going to double up as a light barrier. This stuff also comes in brown and white - I'm sure the brown would be fine as well.

I stuck the foam around the entire face of the holder, making sure it was as neat as possible and there were no gaps. You'll need to trim the foam very carefully around the inside circle to make sire none is covering the lens area as this will show in your image. Again - I used a scalpel for this, but if you're not confident with a sharp blade - or just plain cack-handed, you could try cutting the foam to fit with a scissors first and dry fitting it with the backing still on, before fitting. Any doubts - get an adult to help! This is the most expensive item to buy and it was still well under £10 - if you already have some in the shed, even better!

Then all you need to do to finish is slide in the glass carefully, so the foam doesn't tear. Once it's seated nicely the idea is that you leave it in the holder, so it's easy to handle safely and has a degree of protection against accidental breakage.

4. The adapter ring

This is a standard fit adapter ring, easily available online. I bought a 77mm one to fit the diameter of my Nikkor 10-24mm extra wide angle lens - the rings are available to suit all lens sizes, so you just need to source one that suits the lens you'll be using. This one came in at £4 delivered - I could have taken the ring out of my other holder, but for 4 quid, it's easier to just get another one and leave it on this rig.

The ring snaps into place as usual, on the holder back, and that's everything done!










In use, the whole lot can be easily spun on and off the lens front, without you cutting your fingers off and the holder prevents breakage in your bag - here's the lot spun onto the front of my wide angle lens. Also, even with this dark filter in place, you will probably still need an ND grad to balance the sky, so the remaining 2 slots in the filter holder allow for you to slide in a grad in front of the glass!

It's a neat solution and all in cost less than £20. A big stopper with holder and ring is going to run you just under £200 all in, so a significant saving.

There is a slight trade off for the low price - welding lens glass is green, so all your images will have a green colour cast. If you shoot your images in RAW, this can be taken out in processing to achieve a normal white balance, but there's a much simpler and more satisfying route - shoot for mono images. If you set your camera up to shoot mono - or even better, convert your raw files to mono, the green cast is an irrelevance and you'll be able to shoot dramatic long exposure mono exposures all day long for a fraction of the cost!

To use this system, you're going to need a tripod naturally, along with a remote release of some kind – preferably with a lock off on the shutter button to allow you to take really long exposures. At anything over 30 seconds, you'll need to set your camera to manual, dial in your aperture and set the shutter to "BULB". Then with the remote release, you can leave the exposure as long as you need.

With exposures of around 4 minutes, 10 or 15 seconds either way won't be that critical
so to make timing the exposures easier - I bought a super cheap plastic stopwatch so I could time my exposures accurately. It seemed to be the easiest way to make sure your exposures are all the right length - an ordinary watch would do it though - just not as easily.



So there you have it - bargain long exposure fun ahoy!

I'll be posting how I get on using this in the near future, along with the results, so keep an eye out for that and it might convince you to give this a try - at this price there really is nothing to loose - give it a go! If you do - let me know how you got on - I'd love to see your experiments.


As usual - if you're enjoying these posts, do let me know with a comment - I'd love to hear from you! Keep shooting!

Best laid plans

"Rydal Water" © Richard Evans Photography

I was in the Lake District last weekend - 2 days booked as a birthday treat which we'd planned to spend doing a bit of sight seeing and some photography. I was looking at it as a 60/40 photo trip - my wife was seeing it as an 80/20 shopping trip! That aside we were both looking forward to a couple of days away without the kids.

I've settled into a fairly efficient work pattern that's developed as I've progressed shooting landscapes - it seems to work ok for me an as the saying goes - fail to prepare - etc, etc. It usually goes like this:

Planning:
Plan in a location
Check the sun's details on "Photographer's Ephemeris"
Check the weather on the BBC site (seems the most reliable for the UK's random weather)
Note the times and where I need to be in the landscape
Make sure my equipment's ready

Shooting:
We've covered this previously - tripod, remote release, filters ready to go, plenty of memory cards - fire at will!

Processing:
Check through the Nikon raw files (NEF)
Convert everything to DNG files using "Adobe DNG Converter" (free to download from Adobe)
Process my selections in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop CS

It's a work path that seems to be working out and leaves little to chance.
Unfortunately - "little to chance" is sometimes all it takes!

The weekend started with an hour sat parked on the M6 while the Highway's Agency cleaned up a suicide - a bad omen in anyone's book.

Saturday we woke to drizzle and low cloud - not best. The forecast was for something similar so I can't really complain. I'd planned to be at Buttermere for sundown, but the day didn't pan out that way and my wife's idea of shooting a landscape seemed to take far less time that the reality. She lost her gloves, I gave her my gloves to reduce the moaning, she got bored and cold, I called it a day far in advance of the evening light and we went to get something to eat. We never got to Buttermere, so all my printouts of site and sun information went in the bin.

Sunday, determined to stay upbeat - I woke with enthusiasm for the planned shoot at Tarn Hows - (this is my wife's favourite lake so I was optimistic that there's be less boredom. I threw open the curtains to find snow - the weather forecast was for sun and cloud - the plan was screwed!
We decided to go to a site I'd spotted the day before on Rydal Water as it is more accessible and salvage some shooting time. I got to the site, set up and fired off just 12 frames before it scythed it down with sleety rain and we trudged back to the car defeated!

And that was it! The rain was in for the day and only stopped when we got back home - where it was fine. The best image of the weekend is above, I spotted this tiny island and tortured tree from the road and managed to capture it just as the weather turned. On a more positive angle - I spotted so many great potential shots, that I'll be spending a few more weekends in Cumbria as the year progresses.

You can't plan for every eventuality, but by covering those that you are able to, success, while not guaranteed, is more likely!

Fun with filters 6…

Neutral Density filters - the flavour of the moment!

"Verticals" © Richard Evans Photography

I'm going to round of the "Fun with filters" posts by devoting an entry to Neutral Density (solid ND) filters. If there's a single single photographic accessory that's capturing the imagination at the moment - it's the ND filter! Whether you love the dream-like slowed down feel of the images, or are sick to death of yet another milky sea - long exposure imagery is currently filling the pages of the photographic press and seem to be the most consistently highest voted images on 500px.

Essentially, an ND filter is a square of either black resin or glass, that sits in front of your lens and drops the amount of light that is able to enter it and get to the sensor. This opens up all sorts of daylight possibilities that were only available in very low light and will allow you to run really long exposure times during daylight hours, to produce stunning and unusual artistic effects.

As for the ND grad filters - solid ND filters are either measures in light stops (one stop - 10 stop) or with a number equivalent (ND2 - ND 1024), but unlike the grads, these filters are uniformly tinted to one strength. They are also slightly smaller as they don't need the up and down adjustability of the grads. The longer exposure times available then allow you to keep static items in pin sharp focus, while moving items like the sky or moving water, will be blurred. As the tints are neutral, the filter should (in theory) add no colour cast to your image.

In order to get the kind of smokey etherial effects that are so fashionable at the moment, the majority of long exposure fans are polarized around one single product - the Lee's filters "Big Stopper". There are plenty of other products out there, good and bad - but the big stopper does seem to be rightly popular due to it's combination of high image quality and the ability to offer really long 10 stop exposure times. They are however - extremely expensive! The filter is just over £100 and you will need a Lees holder that will run you about the same again when you add the adaptor ring - so it's really not an impulse buy!

I've shopped about and found that you can get Hitech filters that will fit a Cokin P holder, up to an equivalent density and at the moment I'm on the fence debating whether to spend £100 on one of these or bite the bullet and go with the guarantee of quality. It's a tough call! At present, I have a couple of ND8 filters and by stacking two of these up with an ND grad, I achieved the image above. The lake was fairly choppy, but the long exposure rendered it like polished concrete and gave an interesting effect. Obviously - using a single darker filter will offer better quality than stacking in 3, but it allowed me to experiment!

Pointing this kind of setup at the sea will or a fast moving waterfall, will offer you the best opportunity to capture a dramatic blur. Also, architecture images look fantastic with a blurred out sky filled with drama. These images catch the eye and captivate the imagination - it's no wonder everyone seems to be doing it! If you're into these kind of images, why not give it a go? You can get cheap Ebay versions to allow you to experiment, but these typically aren't available above ND8 and this really isn't dark enough to allow for the desired effect - you'll need to stack a couple up together. The cheapest decent quality 8, 9 or 10 stop filters I've seen are from Hitech and they go from around the £100 mark to fit a Cokin P holder - the larger sizes are more expensive.

Using the filters, requires you to work in a certain way – as they're so dark, looking through the viewfinder to focus is near impossible - so here are a couple of tips to make things easier:

Set up your gear and compose your image as usual - tripod shooting is the only option with exposures this long! Focus your image with only the filter holder attached, so you get everything pin sharp. Then switch to manual focus to lock it down.

Add your filter and start shooting - referencing the histogram of your images so you can adjust if needed. With an exposure over 30 seconds you'll need to switch to manual and select "bulb mode" to get the correct exposure time. 

Make sure that "noise reduction" is switched on if you have it, as a long exposure can get pretty noisy without this.

Practice will improve results, so start experimenting!

Budget ND idea…

I did recently read a great budget article showing how you can use the glass lens from a welding mask, to replicate the 10 stop effect - the great thing about this is welding lenses are REALLY cheap! I searched Ebay quickly and found that you can get a box of 10 for £3.50, so 35p each. They're an odd size, so they won't fit any filter holders, and the glass is green to protect the welders eyes from the flare, but you can get around both these issues:

I've been thinking about the neatest way to attach the glass to a lens. My initial idea was to glue a spare adaptor ring to the glass with epoxy glue. This would be secure but may be difficult to screw the whole lot on in the field. I'm now thinking that the best route would be to buy in another cheap Cokin P holder and adapt this by sawing out the filter slots. Then, get one of the lenses cut at a glass works to the 84mm width and glue that into the adapted holder. A holder is a few pounds, glass cutting can't cost more than £5 (and I'll have 9 spares!) and you'll end up with a useable system that isn't difficult to use! The glass should be reasonable quality too as it's manufactured as an optic.

The green cast from the glass will give your images a strange colour cast, but this can be corrected if you shoot in raw. Better still - as this is a cheap experimental gig - why not shoot your images with the intention of converting them into greyscale monos? The green cast makes no difference whatsoever when you convert to mono, so you can get creative fine art landscapes images for under £20 - maybe under £15.

Now I've written it down - I'm definitely going to give this a go! If it works out ok - I'll post up a "how to" so you can see how to make up your own.

To finish, I found this really comprehensive guide to all things ND, so if you want to get a more expansive overview, click through and give it a go:

http://www.redbubble.com/people/peterh111/journal/4421304-the-ultimate-guide-to-neutral-density-filters 

 

As usual - if you're enjoying these posts, do let me know with a comment - I'd love to hear from you! Keep shooting!

Fun with filters 5…

Neutral Density Grads

 

As I mentioned in the previous posting, neutral density filters are simply dark filters that are used to control the amount of light that enters the lens, without introducing any colour cast to the final exposure - hence "neutral". In this post we're going to explore ND graduate filters in a bit more detail and how to use them to your advantage.

A graduated filter is basically a piece of glass or acrylic resin that is dark at one end graduating to clear at around the mid point. As mentioned before, this is the ideal tool for controlling light in areas such as the sky, to balance the overall exposure and prevent it from blowing out. This can be controlled by bracketing and combining exposures to make an image with the best exposure for each area, but by using an ND grad filter, you can control your exposure in-camera and achieve the results you want without a lot of post-processing in photoshop.

ND grad filters are available as screw in or slot in filters, but by the nature of these filters work, the screw in versions are really not ideal. The graduation typically ends across the diameter of the circle and this limits your compositions so you have to keep the horizon line straight through the centre if the frame. Ideally, you'd want this to fall on a line following the rule of thirds, and the filter doesn't allow for this. A slot in filter system allows you to drop and lift the filter to ideally suit your composition. Plus, you can combine more than one graduate for a more complex effect. The filters also add more definition to cloud forms in your skies and boost up the colour, although not in the same way a circular polarizer would.

Grad filters are available as hard and soft grad versions - in use this basically means that, although the tinted areas stop at the same point, in the soft grad version, the gradation of the tint to clear is over a larger area and the hard grads taper to clear very quickly in a small area. In use, this means that a hard grad is ideal for use where you have a large flat horizon that you can sit the grad on - such as a sea scape. Soft grad filters are a bit more forgiving and you can use them on more uneven horizon lines without too much trouble. I've read a lot of magazine articles on ND filters and most people suggest that the hard grads are easiest to use for the novice - I only have soft grads as I think they're more flexible in use and I've not had any problems composing with them. In fact, the softer graduation curve means that they're more forgiving.

 Here's an example of one of my images where I've deployed a 2 stop ND grad (ND4) to hold back the sky areas against the foreground. As this was shot into a hazy sun, the filter was essential to stop the shy from just blowing straight out to white in the centre.

This was taken using a set of really cheap ND filters I bought on E-bay and I didn't realize how brown the filter tint was until I purchased a better quality set of replacements recently. That said, I like the colour cast it's put in the sky - it was early morning and the light was quite golden anyway, so it's resulted in this desaturated "tobacco" colour that's not unpleasant!

This is one thing to bear in mind when buying any ND filters - there are loads of cheap versions available, and these are great to practice with to fine tune technique, but they may not be manufactured to the same standards and calibration as a more expensive branded filter. Also, the resin sheets may not be the best optical quality. I first noticed about a month ago, that my cheap ND grads were introducing some weird patterns into the sky that look like banding. I put this down to a combination of the tint and maybe inferior acetate and replaced all my filters for Kood branded versions, that are far more "neutral" in colour. I used the ND4 grad on the image at the top to capture the dawn light 2 days ago. The light was so low at that time of the morning that even a relatively light grad delayed the exposure long enough to show the motion blur in the clouds, and added a nice atmosphere. You can see that the pinkish colour cast has gone and the blue pre-dawn light is more evident - I wanted the shot to look cold (it was bloody freezing at 5.45 am setting up).

Here are a couple of quick pointers for using ND grads in the field:

• Keep your filters to hand, but safely stored. They pick up dust really easily due to static and are fingerprint magnets. I tend to take one filter out at a time and keep the rest packaged up in a wallet in a pocket or my bag. Try and hold the filters by the edges to keep your fingers off them.

• Always blow the filters and your lens front over to make sure you get as much dust off as possible. Remember to do both sides of the filter so there's no dust trapped on the lens side.

• Always slot in your filters starting with the slot nearest to the lens front - then if you want to add a second, slide that in front. Quality may be affected if you add 3 or more filters at one time.

• Compose your shot and focus with the filter holder attached but nothing slid into the slots. This makes it easier to get a correct focus for your image. Once you have this how you like - switch to manual focus to lock it in place. If you leave autofocus on, the camera will keep trying to focus on the filter and defocussing itself (leading to much swearing until you get with the program). For slot in filter systems - manual focus is king!

• Try not to drop a filter, especially on the beach. If you do drop a grad, don't put it back into the holder as it will make that dirty and probably scratch it up as you slide it in. I dropped one into the snow once which was not quite as tricky, but still meant that I had to stop using it for that shoot as you can get drying marks.

• If there's any moisture in the air (fog, rain or sea spray) this can sit on the filter front and result in strange light or dark dots appearing in your image. These will have to be cloned out, so it's good practice to check the filter front regularly to make sure it's clean.

• Be sure that the filter is slotted all the way across the lens as even the clear end of the filter sheet will leave an unpleasant line across your image if it's not slid down enough.

There we have it! If you're thinking about getting a set of ND grad filters, hopefully this has given an overview of how they can aid your exposure and how to best use them. I really like working with them and think they add more to an image than simply bracketing and merging exposures can offer. If image quality is a concern - go for Lees products (if it's good enough for the world's best landscape photographers it'll be fine for the rest of us). If you want to try them out without breaking the bank, try some cheap Cokin P sized versions for a few quid and if you like using them - buy better quality replacements that will fit the same holder (Cokin, Kood, Hitech - they're all good). Give them a go - you won't turn back!

If you're enjoying these posts why not let me know by following or leaving me a comment - I'd love to hear from you! Keep shooting

Fun with filters 4…

Neutral density filters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These are probably the most popular effects filters used by landscape photographers at the moment and are loved and loathed in equal measure. If you look at a site like 500px.com and check out the most popular images, the landscapes making the top of the list are all heavily filtered to give a dramatic look to the sky or slow down the exposure for a misty ethereal sea. 

I’m going to show my hand early here – I’m an ND filter user (saying it makes me feel kinda dirty). I like the options they offer for creative experimentation and I’m in the fan camp when it comes to the long exposure images – I think they give the opportunity to introduce “Mood” to an image and convey more of a feel for the location. For every fan of these images however, there are just as many who really don’t like them.

I recently read a magazine article where a photographer laid out his case against the use of ND filters, saying that he’d seen enough “pink skies and milky seas” and that we should stop using filters as “Ansel Adams didn’t use them, so they’re basically a superfluous visual trend”. I have a colleague who falls into this camp, saying that you can adjust the exposure of your skies in photoshop, so why put a piece of Perspex in front of an expensive  lens? I think he has a point, but in reply I think, not everyone has his level of photoshop skill to correct their images in processing and many prefer to get their exposure right in-camera to start with.

Whichever side of the fence you fall down on, here’s a quick rundown on what these filters can offer and where to use them.

Neutral Density (ND) filters are basically used to alter the amount of light that enters the front of your lens – think of them as sunglasses for your lens. They’re called Neutral Density because they are designed to lower the light entering the lens without adding any detrimental colour cast to your image – hence “Neutral”. In practice – many do alter the colour, especially the cheaper non branded versions, so this is something to bear in mind when buying.

There are 2 basic types of Neutral Density (ND) filter – Solid filters and graduate filters. Almost all ND filters are manufactured from resin sheets and are then usually dyed by hand to the amount needed for a specific strength of filter. There are some glass versions but most manufacturers now use optical resin as it's much safer. The down side to this is they can scratch really easily, and so need to be handled carefully and stored well to keep them in good condition. The graduated filters are dip dyed by hand to get the graduated effect. It's part science - part craft.

Neutral Density Grads

How many times have you shot an image outdoors only to find that your exposure either blows out the sky or makes the foreground too dark? This is due to the dynamic range of the light in your image being far greater that your camera sensor can capture. It will be able to properly expose for the sky or the ground but the stretch between the two is too much for it to cover. Ordinarily, the way to compensate for this is to take a few bracketed exposures so you get a good image for both sky and ground and then combine these with image editing software to make a better exposed single image – this is a simplistic form of HDR image (High Dynamic Range).

If you want to improve your image in-camera then this is where an ND grad can help. It will allow you to reduce the brightness of the sky so the foreground can now appear lighter – giving a more balanced overall exposure. As an added bonus effect, a grad filter can throw more definition into the sky, adding more drama to clouds. There are 2 typed of graduated ND filter generally available – hard or soft grad. The difference is obvious when they are put side by side with the hard grad tapering off very quickly to clear and the soft grad having a more gentle graduation to clear. I’ll look at these in more detail in the next posting.

Solid ND filters

These are used more as a creative effect filter, where you reduce the overall light entering the lens, to enable a longer exposure time during daylight hours. This will allow you to blur moving objects while leaving fixed objects pin sharp, so this is the filter you want for that image of a jetty sticking out into a sea of fog.

In the main – solid ND grads are the filters that you either love or hate and the one that divides opinion the most. I like them and they are great fun experimenting with – I can see this kind of image falling out of favour sooner rather than later as tastes change and the next big thing catches people’s imagination. They’re really great for moving water, so ideal for rocky streams where the water movement can be altered creatively. Also, you can use them for architectural images where there are a lot of crowds – make the exposure long enough and the people will drop out leaving just the building, of maybe a couple of interesting ghosted figures – all great fun to work with!

I’m going to do a post on each of the 2 types of ND filters in more detail as there’s a lot of ground to cover, but before winding this up, I’ll give an overview of how ND filters are calibrated, and what the figures mean.

How are they calibrated?
 
When looking to buy any Neutral density filters, they will have some kind of calibration system to let you know how dark they are. This is where a lot of confusion arises as there are 2 ways that manufacturers list their product and it’s confusing if you’re unfamiliar with them. ND filters are either calibrated with a number or by the number of f/stops of light they reduce the exposure by. The 2 systems do match up:

1 stop ND = ND 2

2 stop ND = ND 4

3 stop ND = ND8
4 stop ND = ND16
5 stop ND = ND32
6 stop ND = ND64
7 stop ND = ND128
8 stop ND = ND256
9 stop ND = ND512
10 stop ND = ND1024

So for example – if you see a 3 stop ND filter and an ND8 filter for sale, they’re the same thing (confusing and easy to buy the wrong thing or 2 of the same thing – good times!)

We’ll wind things up there for this posting – I’ll be looking at ND grads in more detail in the next post and solid filters after that, so look out for those if you’re interested in experimentation with these creative tools!

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