I WAS BLINDED, BUT NOW I SEE...

...By the sky that is. Armed with a brand new set of Neutral Density graduated filters (AKA ND Grads), I set off to a location I had been to many times before, to test them out.
For those who are thinking "what the hell are you talking about!", let me give you a quick explanation.
Filters are either circular and screwed onto the lens or square/rectangle and in a specially affixed mount on the lens. There are many types of filters available today and what they are designed to do is - create effects, correct exposures and improve photos in general. The particular set I got are a series of tinted black to clear filters with varying intensities. What this helps to do, is to correct the exposure between the sky and foreground/subject. For example - when the sun rises, to a camera, the sky is a lot brighter than the foreground and needs help to expose everything correctly or as we would see it in real life. Cameras are similar to the human eye in many ways, but one thing it cannot do is compute multiple exposures in one scene. The human eye is so sophisicated it adjusts to the scene depending what we are focussed on. What this filter does is cuts out a % of light to a certain parts of the scene so it comes back into line with the fully exposed (or clear part of the filter).

In the image below I used the filters to tone down the sky so I could have the clouds visable (because they were very cool!) at the same time as the waves. I liked this shot because of the contrast water. Not in colour, but in movement. You'll notice many different things happening - to the right third of the image, the wash is almost frozen, whereas the the mid-bottom left a wave has broken right on the shore and catapulted towards me and drenched my socks you can also see the future breaks slowly moving towards the shore.

Seeya
Josh :) 

Rush, Avoca Beach NSW © Josh Pitt