[stoppingdown]

For years I've felt guilty of not using filters, in particular the graduated one. And I've put at the top of the todo list "buy some decent ones, practice them", but I didn't. Today I'm pretty much with JoJu and toni-a. I think that everything boils down to the signal/noise ratio performance of the sensor in the shadows. Ten years ago it was a problem and probably I was really guilty. Today, if I look at the performance of my Sony a6000, just to make a reference, in most cases I don't see problems. And we already have a number of cameras whose sensors are better, especially in the FF. A couple of days ago I did an HDR because of the classic problem, church façade in backlight, with a bright sky with clouds. In the end, it turned out the single image exposed for the highlights had shadows that were perfectly recoverable. The HDR version, on the other hand, while it has less noise in the shadows, shows massive purple fringing around the branches which stand in the sky, due to the photo exposed for the shadows, and it was impossible to fix with LR. 

 

 

Sure, people advocating graduated filters say that it's better to have the best possible exposure in the camera, and they have a point. But now that noise in shadows is no more necessarily the biggest problem, it's a matter of weighting pros and cons. BTW, there are exposure problems - such as those with a backlight façade - that can't be dealt with a single (or even a double) gradient, and require dodging and burning with a paintbrush. So, it makes even more sense to do everything in post-processing.

 

 

I'm still favourable about uniform, neutral filters for long exposures, such as the Big Stopper (and something like a ND6, that I still don't have). Given that even the quality ones have colour cast problems, I'm starting to wonder whether it would make sense to have multiple, shorter time exposures and merging them (if you don't have problems of continuity, such as trails).

 

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