- The Golden Rule of Landscape Photography
- Become Married to Your Tripod
- Shoot in Aperture Priority Mode
- Composing Great Landscapes
- The Trick to Shooting Waterfalls
- A Tip for Shooting Forests
- Where to Put the Horizon Line
- Getting More Interesting Mountain Shots
- The Trick for Warmer Sunrises and Sunsets
- Turn on "The Blinkies" to Keep More Detail
- How to Deal with the Dreaded Blinkies
- How to Show Size
- Don't Set Up Your Tripod. Not Yet
- The Trick to Getting Richer Colors
- What to Shoot in Bad Weather
- Atmosphere Is Your Friend
- Getting Rid of Lens Flare—The Manual Way
- The Landscape Photographer’s Secret Weapon
- Keeping Your Horizons Straight
- Shooting on Cloudy Days
- Tips for Shooting Panoramas, Part 1
- Tips for Shooting Panoramas, Part 2
- Tips for Shooting Panoramas, Part 3
- Faking Panoramas
- Why You Need a Wide-Angle Lens
- Want to Take Things Up a Notch? Shoot Low
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Landscape Photographer’s Secret Weapon
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So, earlier you learned about the polarizer and how essential that filter is. This filter, the neutral density gradient filter, isn’t necessarily essential but it is the secret weapon of professional landscape photographers. It lets them balance the exposure between the ground and the sky to capture a range of exposure which, without it, their camera could never pull off (it’s either going to expose for the ground or for the sky, but not both at the same time). For example, let’s say you’re shooting a landscape at sunset. If you expose for the sky, the sky will look great but the ground will be way too dark. If you expose for the ground, then the sky will be way too light. So, how do you get both the sky and the ground to look right? With a neutral density gradient filter (a filter that’s dark at the top and smoothly graduates down to transparent at the bottom). What this essentially does is darkens the sky (which would have been overexposed), while leaving the ground untouched, but the brilliance of it is the gradient—it moves from darkening (at the top of the filter) and then graduates smoothly down to transparent. That way it only darkens the sky, but it does so in a way that makes the top of the sky darker, and then your sky gradually becomes lighter until the filter has no effect at all by the time it reaches the ground. The result is a photo where both the sky and ground look properly exposed.