Filter choicE What are the most useful filters for landscape photography?
QThere’s a good case to be made for a circular polarising filter, since it can do things that are still impossible to replicate in Photoshop, such as reduce or remove glare or reflections on water and other surfaces. I would certainly not go out on a landscape shoot without a circular polariser, as it will also help to improve colour saturation, cut through haze, increase contrast and can be used to hold exposures back if you want to create movement within a scene.
But when I think about it, my most-used filter is an ND grad. This is used to bridge the exposure gap between the sky and the land. As a general rule of thumb, the exposure difference between them is two to four stops, so we need to control this difference to balance the overall exposure.
Of course, it’s easy to add grads to an image on the computer. Photoshop, Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom and so on all have grad tools that you can use after the image is taken – and very useful they are too. But it’s rare that I take a landscape shot that includes the sky without an ND grad filter being on the lens.
Just to take this further, I worked out that my most used ND grad filter is a 0.6ND. This holds back two stops of light, and it’s the filter that I use most of all from my collection. I can tell that simply because it’s displaying a bit more wear and tear than the others!
Other filters that you should consider are straight NDs, which simply hold back the light to allow longer exposures. I use these much less than ND grads, but they are still handy to have when the need arises.
Of course there are blending techniques such as HDR that can mean you never need to bother with a physical filter again. That being said, I would still opt to use a filter on the lens to try to get the image right at the taking stage.