How to improve your landscape photography using Neutral Density (ND) grads

What are ND grads?

Neutral Density graduated filters (ND grads) or sometimes called grey grads, are filters where half the filter is clear and half gradually fades to grey. Many of the photographs I take would simply not be possible without the use of these essential tools. Here I'll explain why, and what they do.

Why are ND grads needed?

When you look at a landscape, the human eye does a brilliant job of showing all the detail in front of you. You can see bright details in the sky and detail in the darker areas of the landscape. When you take a photo, often parts of the image are too bright or too dark. This is because film or a digital sensor is nowhere near as sophisticated as a human eye and cannot record this much information.

This is especially the case near to sunrise and sunset, a favourite time for photographers, as there can be a large different to the brightness of the sky and the relatively darker land. In order to achieve a photograph which portrays the scene in the same way I am seeing it, I'll use an ND grad filter.

Example 1

In the example here, the rolling fields of Devon are accompanied by a dramatic sky at the end of the day. If I expose correctly for the fields, the sky becomes washed out and loses detail (see above). Using an ND grad filter, I can position the dark side of the filter over the sky which balances the brightness of the sky with the fields. The scene recorded below shows detail in the sky and matches how I viewed the scene at the time.

How to use ND grads

The simplest way to use ND grads, is to point your camera at the landscape without including the sky and see what the shutter speed is for a certain aperture. Then point your camera at the sky and see what shutter speed is now showing. If the sky is 1/125th of a second and the land is 1/30th of a second, then there is 2 stops of difference between the sky and the land. Putting a 2 stop ND grad filter over the sky will help to ensure the sky is not overexposed and the landscape is not underexposed.

Example 2

In this other example at Burton Bradstock beach in Dorset, I have used an ND grad filter at an unusual angle. As you can see from the first image (above), setting my camera to expose the sky correctly would result in a very dark and featureless cliff and beach. Using my ND grad to balance the brightness of the sky and the cliff, I placed the filter sideways, resulting in the image below which shows the cliff detail and the sunset correctly.

Learn more

If you want to learn more about using ND grads to control the exposure, why not come on a photo workshop where you can put this technique into practice and learn even more about taking great landscape photographs?

Find out about photo workshops

Using ND grads on the Fuji GX617

With SLR cameras, you can position the ND grad by looking through the viewfinder as you slide the filter into a filter holder on the front of your lens. You can then adjust the transition of the filter to the correct place.

When using a rangefinder camera, such as the Fuji GX617, you don't look through the lens but instead through a separate viewfinder, so you have to position the filter another way. I do this by looking at the front of the lens and making an educated guess. This sounds inaccurate, but actually works very well. The transition on the filter from clear to grey is gradual, and often I want the filter to cover the sky which is the top 1/3rd of the frame, so with practice, I can use filters this way with no problems.

The one big problem with the Fuji GX617 is that each lens comes with protective bars to protect against knocks and damage. This makes fitting the filter holder to the front of the lens very difficult or impossible if you are shooting a vertical panorama. The easy solution is to remove these bars using a small screwdriver to unscrew the four tiny screws holding it in place. I removed the bars from all my Fuji lenses long ago so that I can use filters with ease.

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