Black White Photography - UK (2019-11)

54
B+W

T

hese days, you often hear photographers proudly announce

that filters are a waste of time because anything they can

do, digital technology can do better. OK, I agree you can

produce perfect results by taking two shots of the same

scene, one exposing for the sky and another for the landscape,

then combining the two instead of using an ND grad. You can also

mimic the effect of an ND filter by adding motion to an image using

Photoshop, or boost contrast and deepen the sky like a polariser

does using levels and curves, or an application like Silver Efex Pro.

But Photoshop can’t do everything filters can, and even if it

could, would you rather be a photographer or a computer geek?

I personally prefer to spend as much time as possible on location

shooting images than chained to my Apple Mac processing them,

which means I like to get my shots as close to finished in-camera

so they require minimal editing. Filters help me to achieve that

as much today as when I was shooting film, so I use them.

Despite the advantages of digital technology, filters still play an

important role in the life of the creative black & white photographer.

Lee Frost offers his 10 top tips.

All images

© Lee Frost

TECHNIQUE ESSENTIAL FILTERS

TOP TIPS

The golden rule with digital photography is

not to blow the highlights. Why? Because

if you do, no detail or tone will be recorded

in those areas, which means there’s

nothing to rescue later. This is a common

problem when you include sky in your

shots because it’s often much brighter than

the landscape, so when you expose for the

land, the sky is overexposed and parts of it

blow out. To prevent that happening, all you

need to do is pop an ND grad on your lens.

ND grads are grey on the top half – that’s

the neutral density part – and clear on the

bottom half. The idea is that you slide the

filter down in its holder so the grey part

covers the sky and reduces its brightness

so that when you expose for the landscape,

the sky is also correctly exposed.

Val d’Orcia, Tuscany, Italy

Contrast in this scene was extremely high due

to the brightness of the sky. Without use of a

strong ND grad, there’s no way a single frame

would have recorded all that detail.

Canon EOS 5Ds with 70-300mm zoom lens,

0.9ND hard grad, 1/250sec at f/8, ISO 100

1 NEUTRAL DENSITY (ND) GRAD FILTERS