TWIP Using ND filters for blur

Purpose of an ND filter in photography is a question most people ask when they see the big odd shaped pieces of glass on the front of a camera lens.  These filters can be screw on, square or rectangle.  Various filter types include regular ND filters, graduated ND filters and reverse graduated ND filters.  

The regular type filers stop light from the whole lens that is coming into the camera.  Most of them come in 3,6, or 10 stops.  Stops is the measurement of the amount of light coming into your camera.  For instance, if you are shooting a scene with a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second and decide to add a 3 stop ND filter to the front of your camera, your shutter speed will now be a 1/8th of a second.  You change your 3 stop to a 10 stop, you are now at 16 seconds on your shutter speed.  I have a little handy chart that assist in calculating this in the field.  You can find these anywhere if you just search google.

The graduated filters help the photographer to even out the scene in terms of exposure.  I have found that majority of the time, the sky is about 3 stops brighter than the ground, therefore, on scenes where I am trying to get cloud movement, I put a 3 stop graduated filter in front of the camera as well.  These come with a hard line, for flat horizons, and soft edge for those with lines that aren't so flat.  Reverse grads are what most use for sunsets.  The top is lighter until you get to the horizon line where it is most dense as when shooting the sun, the brightest point is at the middle area of the frame.  

Below is an example of what ND filters can do for your photography.  The top shot is a behind the scenes photo with my iPhone.  You can see the clouds are frozen in time.  This day the wind was blowing about 30 mph and the clouds were really moving.  I placed my 10 stop on the front of the camera and a hard grad filter which is another 3 stops to get this exposure.  Exposure on the bottom two photos were approximately 120 seconds.  I believe the longer exposure gives a little more life to a regular mundane scene.  

Thanksgiving Sunsets

Over the Thanksgiving break I took the opportunity to enjoy some warmer weather and take a series of sunset photos.  The clouds were ripe for a great sunset, but just before the sun went down the wind had a different idea.  The wind picked up and cleared out what was going to be a very colorful sunset and left with this little band of clouds.  I attempted to do things right in camera and not use HDR for this sunset.  I used a 3 stop hard edge neutral density filter since there is practically no elevation differences in the landscape of the northern plains to even out the exposure.  I then transferred the files into Photoshop after my usually adjustments in Lightroom and added an LAB processing effect to the photos.  LAB processing brings out the natural oranges in the photo and adds to the saturation without degrading the image.  I toned that layer back to get the sunset the bright orange that I experienced that night.  I put the sun in the center of area toward the bottom third to get the most amount of sky possible and to crop out the farm buildings to the right side of the photo.  I normally would include those in the photo, but these wouldn't have added to the photos.

This photo was taken just a minute or two before the very top photo.  To see the difference in LAB color effects and regular process scroll back and forth between the two.  I cropped the other file to a 16:9 ratio because I didn't like the fence line in the photo below.  

These were the clouds on the backside of the sunset.  I thought these would stick around long enough, but again, the wind had a different idea. I took this photo with my fisheye lens and marginally straightened the horizon line in Lightroom.