Graduated Neutral Density Filters

Duirinish Crofts (Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 24-105mm lens at 105mm, ISO 200, 1/13 sec at f/16, Grad ND8 Filter, Tripod)

I took the above photo this morning when I was out and about on the Balamacara Estate.  It was a pretty dull overcast sort of a day but the sky was much brighter than the land so I decided to use my graduated ND filer to try and get a more even exposure.  I opted for my strongest filter, the ND8 Grad and as you can see it has certainly darkened down the sky a fiar bit.  I also underexposed the overall image by one stop and then adjusted the exposure levels in Lightroom a little, not much though.  This one was cropped to remove the boring foreground, just lots of grass, and to bring more emphasis to the sky.

I also converted the image to black & white using Nik's Silver Efex Pro with their High Structure - Coarse preset  I applied a modest red filter and increased the brightness level a bit too and the result is OK.

In terms of compostion I was tryig to capture the sense of the numerous fences marking the boundaries of the runrig croft strips running across the image.  I am not too sure this comes across in the landscape image but I cropped it (see third image below) to effectively zoom in a bit and I think that sense of the geometry is perhaps a little bit clearer?

Duirinish Crofts (Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 24-105mm lens at 105mm, ISO 200, 1/13 sec at f/16, Grad ND8 Filter, Tripod)

Duirinish Crofts (Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 24-105mm lens at 105mm, ISO 200, 1/13 sec at f/16, Grad ND8 Filter, Tripod - Cropped)