During my last trip to Yosemite I decided to try using an ND Filter throughout my trip. At the suggestion of Ken Rockwell, I went for the Tiffen 77mm ND .6 filter - pretty cheap off of amazon. I guess you could describe it as sunglasses for your lens. It helped to bring down the shutter/aperture to a more "normal" range for one so that I didn't have to have crazy shutter speeds to compensate for the brightness of the scene.
But I think the best usage for me was capturing some of the incredible waters of Yosemite. The ND filter allowed me to really dial down my shutter to something like 1/8 or 1/5 so that I could capture some great pics of water flowing and looking slightly surreal and ghostly. Of course, this would have been ideal with a tripod but I made the best of it I could.
Nice effect, John. What are the advantages of an ND filter over a polarizer? Is it darker?
ReplyDeleteA polarizer basically reduces reflections like along water and boosts contrasts. the 2 places i've seen this used is to make skies really blue and to be able to see through water. these are like your polarized sunglasses.
ReplyDeleteThe ND filter basically reduces the amount of light (like sunglasses) so that you can use a slower shutter and smaller aperture for shots like what i did and for shots with direct sunlight.
Those are cool pictures!
ReplyDeleteA polarizer kind of acts as a ND filter, in that it does decrease the amount of light that's coming in but its use is definitely more for the cutting of reflections (read: glare) and to get richer colors.
Also ND filters come in different "stops" (i.e. different filters can cut out different amounts of light) and I think the main reason people use ND filters in the first place is because people want to use a higher aperture and still be able to slow down their shutter speed (instead of having to resort to ridiculously small apertures).
thanks for the post john!
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