Galloping Green

Using ND Graduated filters can be a bit confusing for a newbie like me, and I haven’t really found out the ‘correct’ way to do this (online or in a book) and I don’t yet own a light meter (shame on me, I know), though this method seems to have worked well for me so far.

I hope you find these notes useful, but don’t be shy with your comments if you feel I’ve committed a gross crime against photography!

I’d like to begin with some recommendations for you to think about as you prepare to take your shot. Make sure that you’ve enabled exposure highlighting so you can check on your LCD whether you’ve blown out any part of your scene (also known as clipping). Next, if  you’re using a tripod, then make sure your lens’s image stabiliser can cope with that. Believe it or not, some IS lenses get very confused if IS is active and you’re on a tripod, resulting in a blurred shot!  Disable your IS if you’re in doubt.  Finally, to ensure the steadiest of shots, you can opt to enable the mirror lockup function in the the camera’s custom functions – this requires two clicks of the shutter to take the shot, the first press locks the mirror up and the second actually takes the shot. Using this feature will get you as close to a perfectly steady shot as you can get.  Okay, let’s go…

1. Switch the camera to P mode
2. Meter against a part of the sky, for example a white cloud by pressing the shutter release button half way and look at the exposure meter in the view finder, it’ll probably have an exposure value (EV) of +1.5 or +2.0.  Remember this number!
3. Now, meter against the a grey-ish part of the ground in exactly the same way and again, remember this EV number.
4. Subtract the two numbers.  What you now have is the exposure difference between the sky and the ground and this is the number you use to select your graduated filters.
5. My own filters are rated 0.3 (1-stop), 0.6 (2-stop) and 0.6 (3-stop).  So, what I do is take the EV difference I’ve calculated and select the filter that matches this number (always rounding up for a darker grad) or use a combination of filters (stacked) that will help you reach this number.
6. Fit your filters, and switch your camera to AV, dial in an aperture of F11 and take a test shot and review this on the LCD.  You can also use the preview button on the front-bottom-left of the camera (with the lens pointing away from you).
7. You can make final adjustments to your exposure with the EV compensation mode.  Take 2 or 3 shots with slight adjustments to the EV compensation to ensure you’ve got good coverage (you might also consider speeding this process up using the Auto Exposure Bracketing feature that most DSLRs have)

Hope this helps with your shots!