40 http://www.digitalcameraworld.com
JUST RIGHT Set a small aperture and use your camera’s depth of field preview button
to make it easier to judge where to place the transition.
TOO LOW If the transition from dark to clear is positioned too low, it’ll clip the tops of
the hills and other protrusions and turn the tips of these dark.HIP TO BE SQUARE
Use a square filter system
to adjust the position of
the transition.CORRECT
BEFORE^ -^ NO^ GRAD
INCORRECT
NEWCANONSKILLS
Working with ND grads
You can reduce the intensity of a bright sky and bring its exposure in line with
that of a dark landscape by using graduated neutral-density filters. The trick
here is to expose for the darker landscape (as the image on the left), then
select a filter that is the correct strength to bring the exposure of the sky within the sensor’s
dynamic range. You don’t have to do any complicated calculations: start with a two-stop or
three-stop filter, take a test shot and check the histogram. If the right side of the histogram is
pushed up to the edge of the graph, use a stronger filter.21