After the umpteenth request about which filters one should buy for landscape photography I have decided to put it in a blog article. You should know by now what the filters are for so I will briefly elaborate on the various components of the system. In most cases I will be referring to Lee’s range of products as it is the globally preferred brand.

The effect of an ND grad

I’m writing this after about 4 years of experience on using grad filters which started with a Cokin P system, went to their Z system and those were quickly discarded for a basic Lee kit after which I decided to invest in a full Lee kit.

I want to give people good advice on my blog and I feel that I would be dishonest if I said that Cokin filters are useful for anything more than a temporary learning experience. The holder system feels and functions like it was made in a chinese toy factory and their filters completely ruin that golden light that landscape photographers put so much effort into finding. The color cast is horrendous. If you disagree then I think you should have your eyes calibrated. If you like that magenta, good for you! What I will however say is that shooting with Cokin grads taught me a valuable lesson about natural colour…by that I don’t mean true color. I’m referring to the variation of colors that natural light can produce in different weather. When I shot with Cokin filters I always saw that the colors in my image weren’t what I saw with my eyes. No effort in Photoshop could get them back to how I remembered the scene. This spurred me on to do research into better products and it led me to Lee filters. Do Lee filters have NO color cast? Of course not…they also have, but it’s not nearly as bad and it’s a more natural brown than Cokin’s awful magenta. I should probably also mention to the uninformed that Lee filters are about 3-5 times more expensive depending on where you buy, but if you’re serious about landscape photography then it’s worth every cent.

Luckily for all of you, I learned that lesson so you don’t have to waste your money on a set of Cokin filters.

The Lee holder

So where do you start when looking at purchasing a Lee filter kit? The first thing is obviously to understand how the filters are attached to the lens…You have an adapter ring that screws into the filter thread of the lens and the filter holder clips onto the ring by means of a simple spring tensioned mechanism. Unlike the Cokin holder which is a solid piece of molded junk, the Lee holder is an assembly of high quality plastic and brass parts that can be customized to your needs. So if you’re shooting with a wide angle lens and vignetting is an issue then you can attach just one slot to the holder or if this isn’t an issue then you can attach all three.

There are a vast amount of different filters, but only two that you really need to focus on. Graduated ND filters and solid ND filters. Based on what I use the most, I’ve listed three kits below depending on what you want to spend. Each item is hyperlinked to the product page on www.robertwhite.co.uk…I’m not endorsing them as a retailer, their website is just well structured and gives you a good idea of what you’ll be paying. The prices below are purely an estimation…with the volatile exchange rate the prices I post today will be irrelevant by next week anyway. Remember that you’ll have to add shipping and import tax to the foreign prices as well for S.A.  Do your own calculations.

The Basic Kit – R3000-R4000 ( $500)

This kit is good for starting out and will be fine for most situations with a linear horizon. You can easily expand to the novice kit by simply adding the multi filter pouch and soft and hard sets when the time is right. The proglass solid ND is an excellent tool for manipulating your shutterspeed to get motion blur from moving elements in a landscape like a river or wave or even people in urban shots.

• Wide Angle Adapter Ring
• DSLR starter kit
• 0.9 hard grad

The Novice Kit – R8000-R12000 ( $800)

This kit is pretty much the same as the basic kit except that you’ve got all six of the basic grads which you gives you finer exposure control for more versatile situations. Protective storage of the filters is essential which is why you should get the multi pouch. With the 15% difference in price, there’s really no justifiable reason to get the normal ring. Vignetting will always be an issue with grad filters so get the wide angle ring/rings.

• Wide Angle Adapter Ring (Various sizes if necessary)
• Foundation Holder Kit
• Hard Grad Set
• Soft Grad Set
• 0.9 Proglass Solid ND
• Multi Filter Pouch

The Professional Kit – R15000-R25000 ( $2000)

This is the ultimate kit and offers the best combination of all filters. Using the 0.6+0.9+big stopper solid ND filters in combination with ISO and aperture you can achieve virtually any shutterspeed in golden light from 1/10s to  30 minutes. The 6 basic grads allow you to balance the exposure of almost any landscape and the front-attaching polarizer enables you to rotate it independently from the grads so you can cut out glare or get that cobalt sky. The polarizer ring screws into the front of the holder and the polarizer screws into that. The reason I suggest you get the professional holder kit with two holders is for a vignetting problem with the 105mm polarizer, which is quite thick. I have one holder with three slots and this gives me no vignetting on my Zeiss 18mm. Then I have one holder with only one slot and the polarizer ring on. With the polarizer attached this doesn’t show up in the frame either and this suits 95% of situations I’ve encountered. If you need to add another grad, you can just bracket and blend for the rare 5% of situations.

• Wide Angle Adapter Ring (Various sizes if necessary)
• Professional Holder Kit
• Hard Grad Set
• Soft Grad Set
• 0.9 Proglass Solid ND
• 0.6 Proglass Solid ND
• Big Stopper
• Multi Filter Pouch
• 105mm front polarizer ring
• B+W 105mm Kaesemann Circular Polarizer

Holder with CPL ring attached and CPL

Valuable Lessons

Some things I’ve learned over the past three years

• SW150 system – I’ve had a play with these on Nikon’s 14-24mm lens and I wasn’t impressed. The setup is very complicated and the filters are gigantic, using it is very far from convenient. There was also ghosting from light reflecting in between the filter and lens, but I’ve read that Ian Plant uses the system and if he’s happy with it then I was probably just not using it correctly. Perhaps he can comment on it…
• Don’t underestimate how easily the resin filters scratch – don’t put them in your pocket or on any surface if they’re not in the wax paper or velvet pouch. You may not be able to see it, but the resin gets micro scratches and before long you can’t shoot into bright light anymore without getting very ugly flare.
• Don’t underestimate how easily the glass filters shatter – I’ve lost two proglass ND’s to shattering. Luckily my insurance was happy to replace it for me which brings me to my next point.
• All risk insurance – I’ve broken two glass filters by accident and lost a whole holder full of filters from shooting on high sea cliffs in freezing winter weather, but then again I may just be very clumsy.
• Combine soft and hard – If the difference is 3 stops and a hard grad is too hard and a soft is too soft, why not use a 2-stop hard and 1-stop soft or vice versa…
• Resin is warm, glass is cold – The grads have a brown cast and the proglass ND’s have a blue cast. With some ingenuity you can counter color cast by combining them in situations where shutterspeed isn’t a major issue.
• They scratch easily so look after them extremely well (I know I repeated myself)
• In 51% of situations HDR will suffice, but it will never be a true substitute.
• Owning them doesn’t mean you know how to use them so don’t get a shock when you just spent a fortune but your landscapes still suck. There are NO shortcuts in photography. It takes a lot of practice and experience to utilize such a system to it’s full potential. After a while you develop a natural intuition for it and metering the exposure difference in a scene becomes redundant.
• Singh Ray filters – I have heard from knowledgeable sources that their color cast is worse than Lee’s. On top of that it’s more expensive and their distribution network is more limited so it’s harder to come by.
• Hitech – apparently sort of halfway between Lee and Cokin? <— Notice the question mark, I don’t know anything about it so I can’t give a reliable opinion.

0.9 Proglass ND...What's left of it after a fall

I bought a 645 system earlier this year to try and answer my questions about the world of film photography. It went with me to the mountains of the Southern Drakensburg, the dunes of the Namib Rand and the heart of the Richtersveld. After about 15 rolls of exposed velvia it was time for the next step – The 617 format. I sold the mamiya 645 and started the search for a 617 camera. After about a month of looking around I came across a Linhof technorama 617s with fixed 90mm lens in South Africa.

It would seem that landscapes were meant to be captured in a panoramic format…why? I’m really not sure. I suspect it might be because our eyes see subjects at about the equivalent length of a 100mm lens on a 617, with a wide field of view? Whatever the reason may be, the images you can compose within a 617 frame are just amazing,  and in my opinion far superior to the 3×2 or 5×4 format. It’s much easier for the eyes, and there’s usually a lot more interest on the diagonal axis than on the vertical one.

The Mamiya I used had a built in light meter, autofocus and it transports the film by itself at the push of a button. It was pretty much the same as digital, except that you didn’t see the result straight away.

The Linhof has nothing.

It doesn’t even use a battery, which gives you an idea of its simplicity.  It’s a box with a lens and some dials and levers you can adjust. You have to compose the image through a rangefinder, which is like a detachable viewfinder that has a mount on the top of the camera. The rangefinder’s frame is only about 90% accurate, so you’ll always get a little more than what you composed and because you’re looking through the rangefinder and not the lens, you have no idea whether  your graduated filters are on the horizon or not.  The other problem with the linhof is that it has a 105mm center spot ND filter which makes the use of normal size Lee filters impossible, so it’s either heavy vignette or a bad exposure. There are solutions like 130mm filters or Lee’s new 150mm system, but I would much rather prefer to have one set of filters for both systems, which is possible with the Fuji gx system. Another problem is that these larger filter sets are only available in limited options like normal grads. No color sets, no polarizers, no strong ND’s.

So after you’ve composed your image and positioned the grad filter to the best of your judgement, you set your desired aperture, you estimate the distance of your subject and set the focus on the lens. Now you put your aperture and ISO settings into your light meter (5D II in my case), meter the various areas of your landscape and try to determine what part you’ll expose for, then you get your shutter speed, compensate for the centre ND filter and graduated filter on the front of the lens. In a dawn/dusk situation you’re usually well into the seconds by now so you set the shutter speed dial to bulb (max exposure is 1 second), cock the shutter, release it, count the exposure time in your head or on your watch, close the shutter again…you have  your image.

Linhof Technorama 617s with 90mm f/5.6 Schneider lens, velvia 100, f/32, 4 seconds, 0.6 hard grad, no center filter, E-6 processing, Hasselblad flextight X5 drumscan

If you want to take another image, you have to transport the film into position for the next exposure and repeat the majority of the process. I found out during one of the best sunsets of the year that it takes about 3-4 minutes for a single exposure.

This may sound like it takes all the fun out of photography, but for me it makes it even more of an art when so much effort goes into producing a single image. It truly feels like you captured the moment in the film and looking at it afterwards evokes the emotions that the moment had. The more effort you put into something, the more you appreciate it.

That’s the philosophical and sentimental side of things, the practical side is another story. How do you go from a slide to a print or file that is commercially usable?

Can you handprint a 617 slide? I would appreciate any feedback on this, please mail me or comment below!

I had the flaming sunset above scanned at a studio in Cape Town on their Hasselblad flextight X5 scanner. R300($45 U.S) later I had a monstrous 148 megapixel 16bit TIFF file. To keep it short, 148mp is overkill, but the image didn’t really have much detail to judge. The scanning introduced a lot of grain and a magenta cast to the image. It is also well known that Velvia has reds and pinks that don’t exist digitally, so no matter what you do, the scan can never stand up to the slide no matter what. Once you come to this realisation, it becomes apparent why it’s so sad that film is a dying era, despite the fact that it can capture light better than any digital camera, it simply isn’t practical or convenient. It is still worth it for me, even if nobody ever sees my transparencies. I think that’s the beauty of analogue photography, you do it for yourself and not to impress other people.

I will still decide if I am going to continue with the Linhof, I would very much like to get a Fuji GX system because of the filter dilemma. In the meantime I’ll be getting the best of the 645 slides from Namibia, the mountains and Richtersveld NP hand printed on Fuji crystal archive paper to see how viable hand printing is as opposed to scanning and giclee printing. If you are interested in purchasing the camera, please contact me.

Check out Koos van der Lende’s website – One of the world’s best panoramic photographers