Sunset at Rock Lake
| 4 imagesWhile visiting my parents for the 4th of July, I took some time to get some photography done. They live up in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, a truly beautiful place. Behind their house is Rock Lake, a small lake that looks out over a number of peaks from the Indian Peaks Wilderness. I brought my whole photography gear package, so I had my wide angle lens and graduated neutral density filters, and decided to make some photos of the vista. It was darkly overcast, and the lighting was poor, on top of there being no real good way to get the mountain peaks over the treetops. Nevertheless…first landscapes I’ve photographed in over a year. I really need to get back out into the mountains soon, maybe up to the Indian Peaks Wilderness itself, and get some landscape photography done.
Sunset at Rock Lake during a thunderstorm.
Nature Photography 
Beautiful scenes!
Considering you seemed disappointed with these landscapes, I think they are quite beautiful. The only experience I really have with graduated neutral density filters is of the software kind. I generally use those to balance out too dark or too light areas or just adjusting to my visual liking. I understand these kinds of filters reduce light where there is too much and let more light in where too little and without changing color at all….just controlling where light hits the film or digital capture. Did you get that lovely lightness in the foreground by arranging the filter so that more light came in there to overcome the darkness relative to the light in the sky? My attempts of actually using filters ON the lens with digital never has worked out very well. Lack of practice and dedicated study probably. I would love to see your future landscapes as I have no doubt they will be stellar!
Thank you for the kind words, Judy. 🙂 I think my only disappointment is just that the trees largely obscure the mountains in the background. I would have preferred the peaks were well above the treetops. Outside of that, it is a truly beautiful place! I really love my parents home and it’s setting.
Regarding the filters, you pretty much have it. My camera, the 7D, has 11 stops of dynamic range (basically, eleven doublings of brightness from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights it can capture in a single shot). The setting at Rock Lake was overall very dark, except for the few patches of sky where the sun was shining through the clouds. Those particular spots were very bright. I would figure that the dynamic range of the scene itself was probably around 15-16 stops. I used two graduated ND filters, a three stop and a two stop, to bring the brightness of those sunny hotspots in the sky down enough so I could capture the scene in a single shot, such that I did not lose detail in the shadows, nor clip the highlights in those bright sunny spots. The nature of this particular scene, with half the sky dark because of the clouds, made it a bit more complicated than is usually the case, but overall (with the exception of the treetops over the mountain peaks), I think the results were quite good!
Using GND filters takes some learning. The learning curve isn’t super steep, but there is a specific technique to it that can help. My general technique is to use M (manual) mode on my camera, so I have complete control over everything. I use the in-camera meter and Av (aperture priority) mode to figure out exactly how much dynamic range there is in the scene, from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights. There is a way to figure out how many stops of dynamic range there is by using the automatically selected shutter speeds when metering dark and bright parts of the scene. Once I know how many stops of dynamic range the scene has, relative to the 11 stops my camera has, I know exactly how much graduated filtration I need to correct the discrepancy. I will write up a Knowledge Center article that covers this in detail. I find the technique, once you get the hang of it, to be immensely useful.
It should be noted that physical ND and GND filters can allow you do do things that a graduated filter of the software kind simply cannot do. The big one would be clipped highlights. If you clip your highlights in-camera, no amount of filtration in post can correct that. If you were smart enough to bracket your shots, and capture middle, dark, and bright versions of the same scene, you can blend them together into an HDR image and tweak the results, but I’ve often found that HDR can frequently be very difficult to tune such that it looks natural. A GND filter is easy to use once you know how, and the results are usually very good and natural looking. Anyway…I’ll put together an article on using GND filtration soon! 🙂