A Labor Day Shot

After trying the GND filters, I start to think the most reliable way to capture these sunset (sunrise) shots is to auto bracket exposures and then manually blended in PS.

This one was done with 0.9+0.6 GNDs.

Looks like a nice shot to me. I prefer filters myself but some people like to blend exposures, I guess there's really no right or wrong way to do it, it's just what works best for you.

Pretty cool Ben. I agree with Daniel. Blending is too much work for me and you have toaccurately blend the photo to get the desired result. From what I see here, the blend doesn't look clean enough but, what do I know. I never blend my images.

Thanks Daniel and Julian. I have just not fallen in love with the filters yet. It's a hassle to use them. It produces vignetting too. Maybe next time I should try to hold them with hands.

Beautiful capture!

lostid wrote in post #8606039
Thanks Daniel and Julian. I have just not fallen in love with the filters yet. It's a hassle to use them. It produces vignetting too. Maybe next time I should try to hold them with hands.

You have to patient Ben. Do you have the wide angle filter adapter? If you do this should move the holder closer to the lens. The other thing I can recommend is to remove one of the filter slots to prevent vignetting. The other thing I can think of is to remove the last spacer from the bottom. This will even prevent more vignetting.

Cyclop wrote in post #8606270
Beautiful capture!

Thanks

jdizzle wrote in post #8606446
You have to patient Ben. Do you have the wide angle filter adapter? If you do this should move the holder closer to the lens. The other thing I can recommend is to remove one of the filter slots to prevent vignetting. The other thing I can think of is to remove the last spacer from the bottom. This will even prevent more vignetting.

Thanks for the advice Julian. Yes I have the Lee holder and the adapter ring. I will remove one of the spacers. The thing bothers me is the two Hitech filters came with not exactly the same size. While the 0.6 HD fits pretty tight, the 0.9 SE fits loose and can come off if I shake it a few times.

Used to remeber the days when I didn't have the filters I just auto bracketed the exposures - 1, 2, 3 - boon!

I think you should step up to the Lee filters. You'll never have those issues like your having with the Hitechs.

jdizzle wrote in post #8606554
I think you should step up to the Lee filters. You'll never have those issues like your having with the Hitechs.

Yeah if I knew this is an issue I would have bought the Lee filters instead. The reason I went with the Hitech was because I was told both produce images with the same quality.

Lovely photo and PP work. I'm a filter guy and this photo with the straight horizon jumped out at me as being perfect for my Singh-Ray RGND. Of course, I'm pretty lazy. But if your Hitechs aren't working for you, with your skills you deserve to take the plunge for better GNDs.

Randy1213 wrote in post #8607202
Lovely photo and PP work. I'm a filter guy and this photo with the straight horizon jumped out at me as being perfect for my Singh-Ray RGND. Of course, I'm pretty lazy. But if your Hitechs aren't working for you, with your skills you deserve to take the plunge for better GNDs.

Thanks Randy.

I heard from people that if there is only one GND filter to own it is the Singh-Ray RGND. I was actually weighting the decision between the RGND and the comb (0.6HE+0.9SE) and finally decided to go with the latter. I think you never know the difference until you try.

Now that is an AWESOME shot!

Pardon my ignorance having never used a GND. Is it the filter that made the land mass on the left-side horizon flat grey? If so, is that another thing that bothers you about the filters or is it more the operation of them?

kito109654 wrote in post #8608847
Pardon my ignorance having never used a GND. Is it the filter that made the land mass on the left-side horizon flat grey? If so, is that another thing that bothers you about the filters or is it more the operation of them?

A GND is a graduated neutral density filter. It reduces the exposure gradually from darker to lighter in half of the filter. And Marcy didn't use one. On sunsets/sunsrises shot in landscape orientation (like these pics), it would not create a difference from the left to the right but from top to bottom. You line up the change in density along the horizon, typically. Hope that helps.

Beautiful shot!...is this North Shore??