More than a year ago I was chatting with a colleague who has taken some amazing landscape photos. He mentioned that rather than using the circular screw on filters, he used the glass plate filters, namely the gradual neutral grey ones. I’ve been debating about picking some up since then, but hadn’t captured many landscape photos and wasn’t sure I would use the filters enough to make it worth my while.

I was wrong.

Canon 60D | 18-135mm lens | 1/320 | f/9 | ISO 100 | Cokin Filter

Living in Utah, we have some gorgeous mountains just to the east of the Salt Lake Valley. One of those mountain tops – Lone Peak – can be seen rather clearly from my neighborhood, making it a perfect subject for some photographs. But I wanted the newer style of filters before I really felt like the photos would be what I was hoping they would be. So once I picked up a Cokin brand Gradual Neutral Grey G2 (ND8) – 0.9 the other day from Pictureline, I had to capture a few test shots.

Both shots seemed to look pretty good on the LCD screen of my Canon 60D, but the ones taken with the filter seemed to have a darker sky – which I really liked. It wasn’t until I brought a filter and non-filter image into photoshop and placed them side-by-side that I realized how much better the one with the filter looked.

The snow in the photo without the filter was almost yellow or orange (which is never a good color for snow). The crisp white color of the snowy mountain was much truer to the actual beauty of the mountain. So I think I am sold on using this type of filter for my landscape shots. Now I just need to get out to the sights of Utah and attempt to capture what the scenery has to offer.

I’ve also been toying with ideas in my head about other ways to experiment with this filter on various settings. So this will not be the last time I use this filter to capture a photo I feel is worth of sharing on my blog. Stay tuned….

~signed, Carltonaut