I’d firstly like to start by saying that I like mistakes in my photography. I like the surprise element so I’m not too bothered whether the grad placement is exact. If I like the results, and they’re pleasing to me, then that’s all that I’m bothered about.

Here are a few examples of images where I really got the grad placement really wrong, and yet the images (in my opinion – which is really all that matters) are a success because of the wrong placement:

Grad placement is above the stones, but is it wrong?

I was aware when shooting the Calanish standing stones, that placing the grad half way across them would cause the top parts of the stones to be black and the bottom parts to be correctly exposed. I wanted to make sure the sky was the same luminance as the ground so I placed the grad right above them and hoped for the best. The final image you see here has an almost halo like effect in the sky – this has been caused by the natural light fall-off that the lens exhibits being compounded by the grad. Yes, my Mamiya 7 lenses exhibit light fall-off. It is quite pronounced in the wide angles and I love the effect very much. I really like this image and felt it worked very well because the top 1/3rd of the sky is similar in tone to the lower tones of the grass.

I think one of the biggest mistakes folks make when using grads is to assume they should always go over the horizon. They don’t always have to be.

Grad is way too high. What was I thinking? Still... I like the final image.

And with this image taken on the Isle of Eigg, I can’t quite remember my justification for keeping the grad so high – perhaps I just forgot to adjust it when I’d changed composition (this is a common mistake for a lot of photographers – rangefinder or not). Anyway, I love the effect that the grad caused and I feel it’s added a lot of mood to the shot. Now imagine if I’d placed the grad correctly – would the image be as dramatic? I don’t think so.

But what if the grad is just slightly too high, just not quite right? Well, in the next image, I managed to place it in the wrong place:

Slightly too high.

I think my reasons for leaving the grad a little high above the horizon was that I was worried that I’d perhaps compress the tones in the Isle of Rum on the horizon – and therefore  under-expose the island. So I opted for moving the grad slightly higher, but managed to move it just a bit too high. Does it kill the image? Well, it’s a personal taste question, but for me, I prefer when grads are just slightly above the horizon, as I kind of expect horizons to be bright. It gives a sense of presence to an image, so in that way, I don’t think the bright horizon is too much of an issue. But now that I’ve pointed out to you that the grad is in the wrong place – you’ll probably feel the image has an issue. If that’s true – it’s your problem and not mine. I feel that I’m able to take a step further away from the image and just see it in its entirety. And when I look at it, like someone would who is viewing it for the first time – I don’t notice the grad placement – there’s simply far too much else of interest going on for me. So I think the lesson with this is to be able to not focus on something too much. Once you notice a problem, you tend to stare at it….. once you point out a problem, everyone notices it. But if you hadn’t pointed it out, most folks I reckon, wouldn’t see it. What others see and what you see are two very different things.

But I’m sure there are images where the grad placement is critical. I certainly get emails from folks who tell me the grad placement was very noticeable, and for that, I’d like to suggest that the reason it is so noticeable, is because they’ve used too strong a grad in the first place. The tell tale signs for too strong a grad are usually overly bright grounds and dark skies. Sure, it looks dramatic, but it also suffers from being extremely sensitive to where the grad is placed. So maybe this is a lesson in easing off the strength of grad you use, and learning to tell which lighting conditions and times of day will require a 1 stop rather than a 3 stop, or a 2 stop rather than a 3 stop.

Ultimately, I don’t think grad placement is really the problem. If you use the right strength of grad, over a subject which doesn’t have such a dramatic change in light levels, then a little bit of bad placement shouldn’t really be a problem.

Lastly, If you still think grad placement is a real problem for you – then Lee Filters now have a Rangefinder ND grad set, with a special holder with markings on it, to aid in the correct placement of the filters. I’d give that a go, if my advice doesn’t help you in any way.

If you’ve not heard about the Big Stopper yet, it’s a 10 stop full ND filter which basically greatly reduces the amount of light coming into your lens, so you can go crazy doing long exposures.

Scarista Long Exposure, Harris

I’m a big fan of the Lee filter ND Grads and full ND’s. They are very neutral. Over the past two years of doing my workshops, I’ve seen many people come on trips and try to cut corners by buying Cokin filters. Only to be disappointed by the poor filter holder and the colour shifts that are apparent in the filters.

So as much as Lee filters are expensive, they’re very worth it in my opinion. But what I didn’t know was just why the filters are so expensive, and when you hear how they are made, you’ll have a better appreciation for the costs that they sell them at.

As usual, I got into a discussion about the terrible waiting times for any of the Lee Resin and Glass filters and the chap at Robert White started to tell me about the filter making process. He said that it takes roughly 1 hour to make a resin or glass filter. They’re hand made and dipped into boiling dye. Depending on how hard or soft the graduation should be, they are dipped in at different rates. Then each filter is checked against a spectrometer for colour shifts and the filter is re-applied to another vat of dye to correct the colour shift. At each stage, they have to monitor the light fall off for each filter. It really is a long process.

When I considered this, it made me realise that the filters are pretty cheap considering how much time and effort goes into making them.

I’ve got a big stopper on back order (4 to 6 weeks). I love using full ND filters in the early morning light, but a 10 stop filter is more a requirement for mid day shooting (for me anyway – I shoot film, so I can’t really go more than a few minutes on Velvia before something horrible happens).

You might wonder what I’m on about, but let me explain further. Firstly, a camera sees in 2D, whereas we see in 3D. But also, our perception is a lot more different than a camera sees because we have far greater ‘dynamic range’. We are able to register detail in shadows and highlights that a film or digital camera can only dream about.

ISO 50, f4 = average reading of 1/4 second, 5 stop dynamic range where shadows are at 2s and highlights are at 20th of a second

This point is mainly the reason for why we often get images back from the lab, that looked nothing like how we perceived the scene at the time. It takes skill and patience to be able to get to a point where you are confident you are going to capture what you saw, and you may need to use neutral density graduated filter to squeeze the the entire range of tones from highlights right down to shadow onto your film/sensor.

So I thought I’d explain a bit more about dynamic range.

Our eye is capable of seeing over a range of 24 f-stops. But a digital sensor or film can see roughly 3 to 6 f-stops depending on the medium (negative film has a higher latitide and can often record over a wider range than slide film can). So it’s very common to want to record a scene that the camera simply cannot handle. You are either going to have an image with underexposed ground, or over exposed sky, or a bit of both.

Now, your camera simply meters everything and works out an average of 18% grey. For instance, if you point your camera at a black wall, the meter will make an exposure which will make the black wall grey. The same is conversely true for a white wall; your meter will make a white wall grey. This is why you need to add or subtract exposure compensation for situations when you know that the overall scene is too bright or dark.

So how do you get the right exposure?

Well the truth is that there is no such thing. It is purely about what you consider important to record, and what you are willing to sacrifice, but there are times when using an ND graduated filter will allow you to squeeze an entire scene which has a dynamic range greater than your film/sensor can record, and here’s how I do it.

I have a rather nice little Sekonic meter which allows me to take many spot readings around my scene and from that I can see the entire dynamic range that the scene contains. For example, I will take a spot reading of the darkest part of the scene and then a spot reading of the highlights in the scene, and from that I will perhaps see that there is a 10 stop difference between these extremes. I know that my Fuji Velvia film won’t handle this and that I really need to get the scene down to around 6 stops of a difference. If I put on a 3 stop ND graduated filter to compress the sky (highlights) down by 3 stops, I’ve reduced the entire dynamic range from 10 to 7 stops. Which is a bit more manageable, but I also have to determine what in the scene is going to appear 18% grey. Remember that when I meter the dark areas of the scene, the meter is telling me what the exposure would be if I wanted the dark areas to be grey. And the same is true when I meter the highlights. So I need to decide where in the middle of the range I want to be my mid tone. This is the bit that is subjective, but if I find for example some rocks in the scene that I think are 18% grey, I will decide that is my exposure point. I will then set this exposure manually (to stop the camera’s meter from changing the exposure when I add on the grad), and take the shot.

With an SLR, it’s a lot easier than this – sure it’s nice to have a meter that shows you the entire range so you can figure out what difference in exposure latitude you need to make, but often, the camera will work out a nice average for you – if you have already placed a grad on the scene anway. So it’s much more of a point and shoot approach to it, and if you are using a DSLR, you can check the exposure to see if you over did the grad – often for example, I tend to find that 3 stop grad is too much and 2 stops is more appropriate.

What the human eye sees, and what a camera see are two different things. The human eye is capable of capturing a dynamic range (brightness values from dark to light) that is wider than what a camera can capture. This is why often you will see a shot where the sky is burnt out while the ground is exposed correctly, or the sky is ok, but the ground is underexposed (almost black). Film and digital sensors cannot cope with such a difference in light values between the sky and ground, yet our eyes are able to handle this difference in contrast and make it appear to us as though the brightness is the same between the sky and the earth. In order to bring this contrast or ‘latitude’ down to a manageable level, so we can ’squeeze’ the entire scene into the dynamic range that a camera can record, we use Neutral Density Filters. Neutral means that they do not affect the colour of the scene in any way, they simply darken down an area of the scene (typically the sky) so we can get a good exposure in camera. I use these all the time for landscape work.

With a rangefinder camera, you do not view your scene through the lens. In the case of the Mamiya 7II, the lens contains the shutter and so is permanently closed, until the moment of exposure. There is also no prism or mirror. Which means the camera is a lot more compact and more silent too. But the draw back is that you don’t get to see what you’ll get when you expose. Most range finders have a side window showing you an estimate of what you’ll get with some dotted lines at the edges to compensate for different focal lengths.

Anyway, the problem with using ND filters on a range finder is that most folk think it’s very hard to judge the correct placement in front of the lens.

Above are two Lee 0.9 (3-Stop) grad filters. The left hand one is a soft grad, while the right hand one is a hard grad filter (one of my most used grads). As you can see – the graduation of the hard grad is rather dramatic in the middle of the filter. Most folks think that placement needs to be precise, but to be honest with you – it doesn’t. When you put something so close up in front of the lens, it becomes diffused. This means that the graduation effect of the hard grad becomes less pronounced. Unless you are really way off with your placement, you’re not going to see a problem.

So how do I place the filter? Simple – I guess. If the scene I’m shooting has a sky that is using 1/3 of the area of the scene, then I place the filter roughly 1/3 of the way down. If the sky takes up 1/2 of the scene, then I simply place the filter half way. Etc, etc.

The other thing that I tend to do is take more than one shot of the same scene. If I’m uncertain about the filter placement, I’ll take the scene a few times, each time with a subtle adjustment, moving it up or down by a few centimeters. But I’ve often found that it’s been unnecessary.

My favourite ND Grads are made by Lee in the UK. I’ve tried others such as the Cokin system but found them not as effective. But they are considerably cheaper. As in everything – you get what you pay for.

One last thing, if you feel that placement on a range finder sounds problematic – what I love about such a system is the ‘visualisation’ process that I go through. I like to ‘imagine’ the final image, and not having direct feed back (via an LCD screen) is a benefit, also being able to imagine the scene in my head and place the filter accordingly, allows me to remain in the ‘creative-mode’. Being confronted with real world feed back takes me out of this ‘creative-mode’ and into ‘editor-mode’ which is something that I feel kills my creative flow when out shooting scenes. So yes, it’s a benefit to me rather than a hindrance.