ND Grad kits - what to go for

Hi,

In a side track from the time consuming nature of my current methods of exposure fusions and HDR – I am planning to invest in a set of ND Grads (ideally a soft and hard set of each). I have been reading a bit about Kood, Cokin, SRB Griturn (also made by Formatt like the Hitech) and Hitech. Lee Filters are just a pipe dream in terms of cost at the moment.

I have heard that Cokin’s have a strong magenta cast if stacked.


I have read some reviews of all these in Advanced Photographer’s latest issue and still can’t make my mind up about the pros and cons of each system.

I guess the Kood’s appeal in theory if they are any good – but I don’t want to chuck my money away if I might regret that decision.

As an early 40th birthday present I have been very lucky that my family have given a workshop day with the awesomely talented Joe Cornish in July – so I think it would be expected that I went along with some ND Grads anyway! I assume he would think HDR is a swear word

Cheers,

Morpheus71

I am hoping to get a 10-20mm wide angle lens later this year for my K-X, the sensor is APS-C size, I have heard about vignetting problems at wide angle with some filter widths - would it be better to go for something wide now in terms of filters such as the Cokin Z-Pro system?

I have hoya prodital filters (ND & CPL). I get vignetting between 10-12mm with both filters attached on the sigma. 12mm is still wide though so it doesn't bother me

so out of my head the Z-pro holder is officially rated for 12mm on APS-C and that's with a single filter holder, The z-pro use 100mm filters just like most others so i doubt they will go any wider with their holders...

If cameras went down to ISO1 we wouldn't need them

Why stop at ISO 1, how about ISO 0.0000001?

Well yeah if you want to do an hour long exposure of the centre of the sun.

On a serious note I dunno why cams can't provide ISOs a lot lower then 80. At least they could go down to 25 or 12. A matter of reducing the gain post sensor, pre converters

We do because these are GND we are talking about not ND
Now if we had a very wide Dynamic range...

Now there's an idea!

I started with the Cokin P filters but did find quite a bit of colour cast, I now use the Hitech filters which to be honest still have some slight cast but much less than the Cokin.

I've found as Hefty mentions that, rather suprisingly, I don't use them very often - despite the frequent comments in Photo Mags that they're essential for landscape photography I find that if you catch the best lighting there's usually no need, probably even less so with the K5 and it's additional Dynamic range/low noise which should allow more detail to be lifted from shadows without problem noise - can't wait to try it in practice when I get chance!!

I started with a set of Cokin P ND grads and, like many others, found they gave a very strong magenta cast when stacked. It's a pain to remove the cast in post because it's graduated across the image. It isn't like removing a cast that's equal in intensity across a whole image - you have to fade the removal with the effect of the filter. If you have a lot of images from a shoot, that all adds up.
I replaced the Cokin filters with Hi-Tech/Formatt and they are a lot better, though still have a slight colour cast. One of them has a dent in the filter surface (though I've never seen it show up in an image) and one has more of a hard edge rather than graduation where the filtration starts, so I'm not convinced their quality control is terribly good but they do the job for me.
Unlike others, I use the grads a lot: pretty much every dawn and dusk landscape shot I take is with a grad.
In terms of what to go for, I use the ND4 and ND8 grads. I have an ND2 grad as it came in the filter kit, but never use it.