Photography News

Filters for Landscape Photography

February 26, 2013 by Bob Simpson

My love affair with photography began way back in the days of film and well before personal computers were a reality. One of the obvious differences between then and now is that back then, you couldn’t open your image on a computer and adjust the white balance, saturation, contrast or the distribution of light and dark tones. The darkroom gave you scope to play around with some of these things, but most photographers relied heavily on filters to manipulate a scene to their liking at the time of capture.

Modern software programs like Photoshop provide alternatives to a lot of the work previously done by filters. But as clever as it is, there are some things software can’t do – or it can’t do it as neatly and efficiently as a filter can. There are three kinds of filters that are still commonly found in a landscape photographer’s kit: polarisers, neutral density filters and graduated neutral density filters.

I won’t go into the technical details of these filters – there is plenty of that information available online – but I will run through some of the reasons I find them useful (or not) and how I use them.

Polarisers

Polarisers are multi-function filters. They can deepen and enhance the colour of a blue sky, cut glary reflections on water and other wet surfaces, and act as de facto neutral density filters, cutting the amount of light reaching your camera’s sensor by 1-2 stops. Unfortunately, benefits rarely come without drawbacks. One common problem with polarisers is the uneven results they often create when used with a wide angle lens. There are some examples of this and more information on polarisers on my website: www.bobsimpsonlandscapephotography.com/articles/polarising-filters-and-landscape-photography

There are two situations where I routinely clip on a polariser: around water and in forested areas. If you want to cut through the reflections on water and clearly see the pebbly bed of a stream or the bottom of a seaside rockpool, then a polariser is your best friend. The effect is readily visible through your viewfinder or on your LCD screen, so just rotate the front element of the filter until the glary reflections disappear. In wooded areas, reflections off leaves and trees, especially when they are wet, can produce lots of little pinpricks of blown-out highlights in your images. A polariser will cut out most of these reflections and allow the more saturated colours of the forest to show through.

Neutral density filters

The most common use for neutral density (ND) filters in landscape photography is to lengthen the exposure time so that moving subjects like a waterfall, clouds or grass blown by the wind are captured with a degree of motion blur. While 1, 2 and 3 stop filters are useful here, many photographers take the matter further and employ 5 stop or even 10 stop ND filters to achieve much longer exposure times and create motion blur even in very bright conditions. Another use for NDs is to allow you to select a wider aperture for an given shutter speed and thereby reduce the effective depth-of-field in an image.

I take a lot of seascapes and have found that the combination of a 3 stop and 5 stop ND filter covers most of my needs. Wave motion is a big part of seascape photography – different photographers have different opinions on the range of shutter speeds that give the best results, but I usually prefer something between 1 second and 1/10th second to provide some blur but still retain detail in the water. If you’re on a sunrise shoot, it’s easy to achieve these shutter speeds while the light levels are still low, but as the sun rises you’ll quickly find that the shutter speeds needed to achieve a good exposure will also freeze most wave motion. Clip on an ND filter and the problem is solved.

Graduated neutral density filters (ND grads)

I rarely use ND grads these days, but I know a lot of other photographers who still rely heavily on them. These filters do a great job of bringing a bright sky into balance with a darker foreground. Like ND filters, ND grads come in a variety of densities so you can match the filter to the scene you are photographing and achieve a more balanced spread of light and dark tones across your image.

My preference is to bracket exposures so the full dynamic range of a scene is captured over several images, and then blend these together manually on the computer using layers and masks to select the best exposed part(s) of each image. I feel this gives me better control than an ND grad, but it also means I have to spend more time at the computer. I’m happy with that trade-off for the time being.

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The last thing I’ll mention about filters is that they come in two main types – slot-in and screw-in. The square or rectangular slot-in variety fit into a special holder that attaches to the front of your lens. It’s easy to stack several filters together to multiply their effect. Slot-in filters are quite economical in that you can use the same filters on different sized lenses by using a different adaptor on each lens. One drawback is that with very wide angle lenses (eg. 16mm) the holder can cause vignetting, and you might find you need to zoom in a little to avoid the effect.

Screw-in filters come in slim profile models to avoid vignetting. They can also be stacked together, but you will need a separate set of filters for each lens with a different sized thread. I use screw-in polarisers and ND filters for their slim-line profile and because I find them less fiddly and more secure than the slot-in filters.

You can capture great landscape photographs without ever using any of these filters, but the creative options they allow and the elegant technical solutions they provide make them at least worthy of your consideration. I don’t go anywhere without a selection of filters in my bag.

Filters

For this image, I. used a 3-stop neutral density filter to lengthen the exposure time and blur the motion of the waves. Canon 5D MkII, Canon 17-40L lens @ 21mm, f11, 2 seconds, ISO100

A polarising filter has revealed the sandy bottom of this plunge pool at Boundary Falls, New South Wales.  Canon 5D MkII, Canon 17-40L lends @17mm, f14, 6 seconds, ISO100

A polarising filter has revealed the sandy bottom of this plunge pool at Boundary Falls, New South Wales. Canon 5D MkII, Canon 17-40L lends @17mm, f14, 6 seconds, ISO100

 

has been a photographer for nearly 40 years, and specialises in landscape photography. Whilst not out shooting, Bob can be found writing for various blogs, websites and newsletters.

4 Responses to “Filters for Landscape Photography”

  1. Love your use of filters to create the water motion in your landscapes. Thank you for sharing!

  2. Linda says:

    Beautiful Images and composition.

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