New Photo Blog Post: Part of your Photos too dark/bright? Graduated NDs to the rescue! #ND #filter #photography

Is my camera working?  Why do some pics have parts that are too bright/dark?
Your camera isn't the problem.  The fact is cameras don't have the ability to "see" the range of dark to light tones our eyes can see.  That said, if you have a scene that has elements that are both very bright and dark, your camera is going to freak out.

The pic above is a perfect example.  The pic on the left is just what the camera said is the "ideal" exposure, no filters, no nada.  This ended up with the bridge being too dark and the sky too bright.  The picture on the right is balanced with a graduated ND filter.  There is no Photoshop done in either.

How is this done?  NDs are your friend!

Okay, here we have the first pic.  I marked up the obviously problems 1) cars are distracting/a pain to get out using photoshop 2)sky is too bright 3)bridge/water is too dark.

Step 1) Get rid of the cars with a solid ND...

check out my previous blog post on sold NDs if you want more info about solid NDs.  The basic idea is that using a slower shutter speed you can essentially make the cars disappear.  This was taken at f/11 at 2 seconds

Step 2) Balance the sky and foreground with a ND grad

Using a Lee 2-stop hard step graduated ND I was able to pull up the exposure, but still retain detail in the sky.  Basically I expose for the foreground and then I cover the sky with the dark portion of the filter.  This exposure was 5 seconds at f/11.

Step 3) Photoshop

The original pic is pretty bland in color, so I thought to convert to black and white.  While I might have been outside a little longer setting up the shot and taking multiple pics, I now have a great starting point for Photoshop.  Rather than editing out cars, and trying to balance the sky/foreground, or using HDR software, I can just get right into Photoshop and do little fixes.  This only took 10 minutes to do in Photoshop.  And think about it, rather than being stuck behind the computer, I was spending more time outside...This is a cool office :)

This is just an example of what can be done with ND grads and solid NDs.  The pic is nothing special, but I want to show what is possible and why things go wrong so often when people get new DSLRs.  In the future I'll do another few blog posts about NDs and more specifics on what I use.

-Morgan