Put me squarely in the "my ND Grads are obsolete and gathering dust" camp (but I do love my ND's). I always struggled with scenes that had elements like mountains and trees that didn't conform to the flat and horizontal line of the grad. So I learned techniques like blending bracketed images or multi-processing a RAW file for those types of situations.
After getting good at it, it typically takes me seconds to a few minutes to blend a sky/land image. With the below image I don't think I could have used an ND grad and gotten a good result. There just isn't any way to control the brightness of the sky on the right without also adversely darkening the mountains. Even if I rotated the grad clockwise to avoid the mountains it still would have overly darkened the landmass on the right while leaving the sky to the left of the mountains overly bright. The blend from one RAW processed twice took me about 2-3 minutes:
JacobL wrote in post #18004349
For getting a single shot, with perfect exposure, color and light balance, without resorting to pulling 3-4 stops just to balance in image, I believe that filters are a must. Yes, we don't always have time to set up and plan the shot, but for landscape, sunset, sunrise and the such, we can spare those 3-5 minutes of setup to get the perfect shot.
If your RAW can handle pulling 3-4 stops, that's a beautiful thing! It allows you to, as you say, get a single shot with perfect exposure, color and light balance, you just do it with a "digital" filter and not a glass one and you have far more control over how the digital filter is applied. Below is the straight out of camera RAW for the processed image above. As you can see I pulled up the shadows a lot. I have printed this at 36" wide and there is zero noise in the shadows.
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© Bcaps [SHARE LINK] THIS IS A LOW QUALITY PREVIEW. Please log in to see the good quality stuff. flyfisher wrote in post #18004764Good example of how much difference that a filter can make. the time saving in processing alone is worth using filters. thanks for sharing the comparison.
Once you are good at blending photos it is actually easier to blend than it is to use filters. For a shot similar to that posted by the OP that has a very defined transition line you could blend the two shots in less time than it would have taken to get the the filter holder out of the bag. Maybe 10 seconds or so for that blend. There is also the added benefit of not having to deal with the space and weight of the filter system which is always something of a concern when I'm backpacking.
JacobL wrote in post #18004883Bracketing is impossible when dealing with long exposures with a large dynamic range.
This is a 1.5 minute exposure, can't be bracketed correctly because blending those long exposures with water is nearly impossible.
This is 6 minutes, again, no blending can deal with getting a clean image with no processing marks from water..
There is no purple tint, it's a little different white balance as I posted them directly from camera but those are very clean colorless filters. (Lee and Firecrest)
Jacob, those are a couple of really nice shots. I do have to disagree with the impossibility of blending long exposures that has a large dynamic range. Both of those photos would have been a straightforward blend using a gradient mask on the sky and luminosity masks elsewhere. In fact, I can't really think of any (?) situation that would not allow for a blend of images to control dynamic range whereas I can think of a number of situations where an ND grad would be impossible to use and still get a good shot, like in my photo above.
And here is something funny. I really dig your two shots above and I wanted to see more of your work so I did a google reverse image search on your shot at the bottom of your post to see if you had a website. The very first image that came up was taken by someone standing about a mile away from me who was also capturing this exact same sunrise. How random is that?!
