Everyone needs a graduated neutral density filter
Filters are cumbersome. You cannot put them on an iPhone. If you forget that you are using one, it will ruin your picture, and they break. Those maybe some of the reasons that 90% of hobby photographers do not bother with them. Hence, a filter may do the trick if you want your image to be in the top 10% of pictures taken from the same vantage point.
I am only talking about one filter: the graduated neutral density filter, blackout on top, and clear on the bottom. I have one for every one of my lenses, for instance, this Tiffen one.
If you shoot in a studio, you would not need one. In a studio, you control the light. In the real world, nature does.
Every landscape shot has sky in it, and except in the dark of night, the sky will always be brighter than everything else in the photo — often by a lot. Most of the time, your horizon line will be horizontal across the picture. Hence, the name. Then depending on composition, it will sit in the top third, dead center, or the bottom third of the frame. A graduated neutral density filter will even out the brightness, such that the top third of the frame and the bottom third of the frame can be captured with the same exposure time.
A graduated neutral density (ND) filter makes the blue sky appear darker and the foreground lighter. Turned around, this filter converts the foreground into a dark silhouette against which any sunset “pops.”
I have not formed an opinion on whether a 2-step ND filter works better or a 4-step one. My gut feeling is that with a bit of Photoshop, the subtler 2-step will be more versatile.
Couldn’t we do everything in Photoshop? Indeed, the advertisements want you to believe this is true. Physics, however, says otherwise: once a pixel is blown out (complete white), no information can ever be retrieved. I use the gradient burn tool in Photoshop, but that makes the top darker it does not recover the data, and soon, the digital manipulation becomes obvious.
HDR is an obvious alternative to a graduated ND but very hard to pull off across four stops if you want your image to look natural. HDR also does not work if your foreground is moving, such as a person, an animal, or anything on a windy day.
Photographic theory tells us to “expose to the left” and then pray that we can recover the shadows without adding noise. As a result, many of the landscape images I see are under-exposed and limited in range. Moon over Hernandez, of course, is perfect, but the final prints required hours of dodging and burning.
In sum, if you know you are shooting outside, carry the extra 100g of your graduated ND and make processing in the post easy as pie.
