AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY MARCH 2016 AUSTRALIANPHOTOGRAPHY.COM 45
Be aware that the cheaper ND brands can show a colour cast,
often towards the green. The better brands tend to be more
genuinely ‘neutral’ in colour.
I always carry a 10-stop and 4-stop ND filter with me when out
shooting – you never know when you might need them.
Graduated filters
Graduated filters or ‘grads’, as they are also known, are half clear
and half filtered with a smooth transition from the clear part of
the filter to the shaded area. They work best with slide-in square
filter holders because they need to be adjusted up and down, or
rotated, for best effect.
The most frequently used grads are Neutral Density grads
(ND Grads) which allow you to darken the sky but leave the
foreground unaltered, thus reducing the overall contrast of the
scene. Like normal ND filters they come in a variety of strengths
measured in one stop increments. I find the most useful ones are
the 2-stop and 3-stop ones, less strength has little effect and more
looks quite artificial.
Some photographers love to use these filters, preferring to
see and capture the effect in-camera. Other photographers,
including myself, prefer to shoot two images at different
exposures and combine them later in Photoshop. The latter
technique is undoubtably more accurate (the filter only has a
straight line transition) but is more time consuming and requires
an basic level of skill in Photoshop masking.
You can also get coloured grads so you can change one half of
the photo to a different colour. For example a tobacco or orange
grad makes a bright sky look more like a sunset without altering
the foreground. Personally I prefer to do any image adjustments
like this in post production but some people swear by their grad
filter collection.