Archive for ND Grad Filter

Scenic Outlook – Balancing the Scene Part 1: Graduated Filters

As a landscape photographer one of the big difficulties you’ll face will be trying to achieve a balance between the land and the sky. During normal daytime hours this won’t be an issue but as we know the best times to be out is during the golden hours either end of the day. At these times the sky will be much brighter than the land and although our eyes adjust pretty well to this kind of scenario our cameras just won’t be able to cope with the huge difference in contrast. This means you will have to compromise by either metering mainly for the sky which would result in a dark landmass, or metering for the land which would more than likely result in over exposing the sky. To overcome this there are a few ways in which we can tackle this problem and the one we are going to look at today is by the use of filtration.

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Two Methods for Approaching High Contrast Scenes: by Anne McKinnell

One challenge photographers continually face is dealing with high contrast scenes.

Typically there are a couple of choices: you can expose for the highlights and let the shadows go black, or you can expose for the shadows and let the highlights blow out. Neither of these options give great results.

I was faced with an extreme version of this challenge during a recent trip to Yosemite Park in California. Going out at sunrise and sunset to catch the sweet light, I found the valley floor in complete darkness unless the sun was high in the sky.

Here is an example of the type of photo you might come home with in these conditions. The sun was setting on Half Dome lighting up the top of the dome and leaving the valley in darkness.

Half-Dome-1

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