Seems like many people now feel that filters for landscape photography are redundant, whilst others still continue to use them much as they did with film. I am mostly in the latter group, but just recently I made some changes which might help you decide.
So, first off, like I said I am a big fan of using filters in my landscape photographs. Here’s the filters I use and why:
Polariser
A polariser helps to saturate colours, control reflections, cut haze and generally give your images a crisp look, especially if there is a lot of small detail, like foliage or pebbles. The effect is also very difficult to successfully emulate in software, so I would say this is pretty much a must-have for landscapes. It’s a simple, subtle, way to elevate an already good image.
Just be aware that if you are including a lot of clear blue sky in your shot when using a wide angle lens, then the polariser can lead to unnatural-looking sky colours, as the intensity of the polarising effect varies depending on the angle to the sun. In those circumstances, if in doubt, take a shot with and without.
Neutral Density
The long exposure ‘Big Stopper’ look has really taken off in the last decade, and I would say at least a couple of these are useful to have in your kit. A 10 stop and a 3 or 4 stop are a good mix. 10 stop will give you that long exposure look in the middle of the brightest day, and a less dense ND does the same in blue hour, plus is useful for smoothing out moving water during the day, especially if used with a polariser that will tend to also extend your shutter speed by an additional 1-stop to 1.5-stops.
One really useful aspect of the 10 stop filter is when the sky in your scene may be a bit boring - even a wisp of cloud can be converted to more interesting streaks and lines by a really long exposure.
ND’s can be variable in quality, with some not being particularly neutral and therefore putting a colour shift on your image, and also the density may not be accurate which can make getting an accurate exposure quite time-consuming. Here’s a top tip from Greg Benz on how to easily and quickly get accurate exposures with a dense filter.
Graduated Neutral Density
This is where the discussion gets more interesting. ND Grads are designed to help you balance the exposure between a bright sky and the darker land. In effect, they help to compress the dynamic range of the scene so it fits more easily into the range of tones your camera can capture. This in turn renders the scene much closer to how our brains interpret it (when we see blue sky and green fields, our camera ‘sees’ bright sky/green fields or blue sky/dark fields, depending on where we set the exposure).
There are two arguments that say grads are no longer necessary with digital. Firstly, you can shoot several shots at different exposures (bracketing) and then merge these later in software. Secondly, many software tools and camera sensors are now very very good at extracting data from the shadow and highlight areas of an image, so a lot of detail can be recovered in post-processing. Greg Benz has posted some great how-to videos here that will help you understand how this works.
Grads coming in different densities, I find 2-stop useful when the light is coming from behind the camera, and a 3-stop more useful then the light is coming from in front of the camera. There are hard and soft transitions between the ND part of the filter and the clear part. Which you choose depends on the scene and the dimensions of your camera sensor (general rule is, the smaller the sensor, the harder the transition should be).
Reverse grads are useful when the sun is low in the sky, especially in coastal scenes. This kind of filter is at it’s most dense at the transition line, and then becomes less dense towards the top of the filter. Because of the brighter nature of the scene, I find these most useful in 3-stop and 4-stop values.
As you’ll see I don’t view the option to use or not use grads as binary, sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.
Red Enhancer
I have an old glass Lee Red Enhancer filter which is really useful for autumn colours and sunrise and sunset. It’s a subtle effect that just seems to tease out that extra bit of saturation and intensity of reds, whilst leaving the rest of the image largely unchanged. It can also be useful in astrophotography to reduce the effects of light pollution. Lee no longer make these, but similar products exist today marketed as light pollution filters, with a didymium or neodymium coating, such as this one from H&Y.
So what’s my filter kit?
Since I also started to shoot medium format digital at the start of 2020, I also decided to upgrade and replace my old 100mm system resin filters with H&Y 100mm glass square system filters. Their magnetic holder makes adjusting grads easy and I find that their glass filters are a significant step up from my old resin filters in terms of sharpness and lack of colour casts. They are also much more resistant to marks and scratches, in fact the H&Y grads are said to be practically indestructible, being made form Corning Gorilla glass.
Medium Format Filter Kit
H&Y Polariser and holder
H&Y 2 & 3 stop hard grads
H&Y 2 & 3 stop soft grads
H&Y 3 & 4-stop reverse grads
All that, plus adapter rings, fits in a Mindshift Filter Hive, attached to the waist belt of my Mindshift Rotation 180 Professional backpack. My Lee Red Enhancer, in a H&Y magnetic frame, goes on it’s own in the waistpack with my camera.
In the main pack is a MIndshift Filter Hive Mini are my ND filters:
Nisi 3 stop ND (in H&Y magnetic frame)
H&Y 6 ND
H&Y 10 stop ND
H&Y 10 stop circular ND
That last 10 stop filter fits in the holders’ polariser slot so when using an ultra-wide angle lens it’s still allows the use of a graduated filter, without vignetting, on a Fujifilm GFX 23mm lens (18mm equivalent). As mentioned earlier, I am unlikely to use a polariser with a lens this wide when there is a significant area of sky in the image, so there are few situations where I would use a polariser and a grad at the same time on the 23mm.
APS Filter Kit
For my APS camera I decided that I really wanted to have the option to prioritise compactness and weight over completeness. So even though I can (and often do) use the system listed above with my smaller cameras, I sometimes pare my filters down to a lot less.
The way I do this is, first, I don’t bother with grads. As explained above, there are a lot of ways to get around this during post-processing, or using bracketing. So for APS cameras, I take just three circular filters:
77mm SRB 4 stop ND
And that’s it. I have these filters in the largest size (77mm) I need, and then use stepping rings to adapt to the lenses I am carrying. I stack these all together with a lens cap on the front and a Gobe metal screw cap on the rear. This makes for a compact and very lightweight package. I was so pleased with this I built a second set to match my smallest/lightest lens set in 58mm diameter, which weighs only 60g and can be slipped easily into to a any pocket.
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