This was my first attempt, shooting with grad ND filters. I have been using fader-NDs and also polar

This was my first attempt, shooting with grad ND filters. I have been using fader-NDs and also polarizing filters a lot but - so far - never used grad NDs.Mostly because it’s a pain in the butt to set everything up. Adding the filter holder to the lens, cleaning the filters, sliding them in place… and then putting everything away again. That takes a long time. It certainly slows down the process of _taking_ a photo a big deal. Using a tripod adds to that.While you don’t *have* to use a tripod, of course, it makes things more comfortable though when the camera has a place to sit on. Especially sliding the filters into the right position is easier. In particular when stacking multiple of them. Shooting via the display helps with that tremendously.For this shot, I had to stack all the three grad NDs I have (ND2, ND4, and ND8) to give me - all in all - six f-stops of darkening on the top part of the image.Just getting ready to take this shot took several minutes. Packing everything back up took at least the same amount of time.On the other hand, it speeds the process of MAKING the photo up quite a bit.If I would have instead decided to make a multi-exposure HDR file and process and tonemap it, it would have only taken seconds to snap the shots necessary. I could have even done this free-hand.Post-processing, developing, tone-mapping and adjusting the shot would have taken much longer though. HDR is sometimes a painstakingly time-consuming process and also a process that demands a LOT of memory card and hard drive space and quite some learning and experience to not make your photos look like HDRs “off the rack”.There are advantages to HDR processing though: much higher image quality (because we do not have any kind of picture quality degradation by on-lens filters) and much more flexibility. The shot you see above is basically how it is. Yes, I could tweak it (and since I shot RAW, I could even tweak a lot), but I certainly do not have the enormous freedom I’d have with an HDR.Do you use grad NDs? What are your experiences with them? Do you do HDR? What do you prefer?  -- source link

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