ND grad filters are a must for any landscape photographer who wants to get the exposure right in the camera and not spend time at the computer blending shots together. ND Grads are for those situations where the foreground and the sky are of contrasting exposures. For example if you are taking a picture of a sunset and just allowed your camera to do the work the likelihood is that you will have a nicely exposed sky but your foreground will be too dark. ND grads are usually square with the top half being shaded and the bottom half of the filter clear glass. This allows you to drop the shaded area over the sky to darken it and retain detail in the foreground resulting in an even exposure throughout.
ND Grad filters come in many varieties; the first decision to be made is do you go for soft or hard filters. With the soft filter there is a gradual change from clear glass to a darker glass, this is suitable when taking images where there is an object such as buildings on the horizon for example. Hard grads are just clear then dark, there is no graduation; very useful for seascapes where there is a clear distinction between the sea and the sky on the horizon.
The second most important settings is to differentiate how much light you want to let in on the shaded area of the filter (the top versus the bottom basically). This differential comes with different measurements depending on your supplier of filters. The market leader in filters is usually seen as Lee; their filters are measured as 0.3, 0.6, 0.9 etc etc. 0.6 ND Grad refers to a graduated filter which lets in 2 f-stops less light at one side of the filter versus the other. A 0.9 ND grad lets in 3 f-stops less light at one side. Majority of landscape photos need no more than 1-3 f-stop blend and if you could only afford one filter (they can be expensive) I’d go for the 0.6 .
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