Posts Tagged ‘filters’

Dan recommended me a budget set of ND grad filters. They’re £16 so you would expect them to be terrible but all the reviews on Amazon spoke highly of them, so I gave them a go. I’ve literally taken a few photos out of my windows so far, and at 25mm I get some serious Vignetting, but at 35mm and beyond it produces good results.

The top image is taken without the ND grad and the details of the building faces and trees are lost. The bottom image is taken with the ND grad and has far more foreground detail while still maintaining the dark and stormy look of the clouds.

I’ve recently purchased a polarising filter for my camera, so I took it out for a test run. You can get quite a difference out in the bright sunlight, though some times it seems to detract from the dramatics of the image. Below is a photo I took of Leeds Canal, with light polarisation on the left and heavy polarisation on the right.

The fly and clouds come out with a lot more texture in the one on the right, and it’s difficult to see at this size but the water goes from a horrible grey to a beautiful blue too.

At first, it felt a little like just under-exposing the photo though. If I wanted to prevent the cloud detail from blowing out, surely all I had to do was drop the exposure a little. But of course that isn’t the case, as can be seen in the photos below.

In the top two photos, I haven’t used much polarisation. In the top one I’ve used the camera’s recommended settings, and in the second one I’ve sped up the exposure a few notches. In the third one I’ve put it back to the camera’s recommended setting, but used heavier polarisation.

As you can see in the third one, I’ve obtained the rich detail of the cloud, while still maintaining the vibrant face of the building, and captured much more detail from the block of flats behind it too.