On ND filters

For my birthday last year, I was gifted with an ND grad (.6, i.e., two stops) filter.  I haven't used it very much in regular shooting, but a recent trip out to a local tourist trap provided some opportunities to use it.  I've been trying to refine a raw workflow, but my hardware is limited and it has been a bit of a struggle to produce images in a timely fashion.

Neutral density filters are useful for a variety of scenes.  An ND filter reduces the light hitting the sensor by some amount.  This is helpful for scenes with a wide dynamic range (e.g., a sunset) or when additional motion blur is desired.  In the former case, the filters are usually graduated so that the horizon can be set properly:  above the grade, light is reduced; below the grade it is transmitted without change.  This is the sort of filter I have, but it serves in both capacities because it is large enough to fit over a 52mm lens without touching the grade.

Images with discussion following the jump.

White Balance and Lighting

White balance and lighting are pretty critical elements of good color composition. I'm hardly an expert at this, and all of my lighting experience has been with natural lighting—no flash systems or anything more complex than an SB-400.

This past weekend, I was able to get some pictures of my parents' firebushes. I was really just killing time, not planning anything...but it worked out fortuitously.

I've wanted to post a bit about lighting, but time and experience are both factors here.

The bushes look a bit like this:

24mm, 1/100s @ f/4, ISO 400

This is actually the "pretty" version of the bushes, taken at the end of the set. With somewhat poorer lighting and bad composition, we get something eternally uglier:

White Balance

White balance is really critical, and I wish I had known this a long time ago. When I bought my camera to go to Kenya, I knew even less about photography than I know today—hard to believe, but true. It turns out that the weather was mainly overcast, and this led to pretty drab photos that I wanted to touch up later. As it happens, automatic color adjustments in most software programs are not really all that great: they overcompensate based on slavish adherence to the color or value curves in the image histogram (this doesn't really need to mean anything to you at the moment, but it does give me an idea for another posting sometime). This is okay when colors are normally distributed in the image, but usually they aren't—that's why we want to fix them in the first place.

The drabness of an image is often the result of improper white balancing. A warmer white balance leads to more saturated photos with deeper reds. In shady conditions, this is usually needed to counteract the bluer tones in the scene. Ken Rockwell (linked right) has a good article on white balance that's worth a quick read, and others exist on the web, too.

This is a bit of an article on my experience.