Three Types of Camera Filters for Outdoor Photography

There are basically three types of filters that I use when I'm engaging in outdoor photography. The first filter that is important for my photography is a polarizer filter, which is designed to remove glares and reflections. There are two types of polarizing filters. One is the circular polarizer design and the other one is the linear design. The circular polarizer design is designed to work with cameras with auto-focus systems.

Now the circular design refers not to the shape of the filter itself, but the way it's designed, the way the light is polarized within the filter. So even though this is a square filter that works with my filter holder, it is a circular polarizer design. So it is something that I use when I'm photographing waterfalls, streams, or scenes like in a forest where I've got a lot of surfaces that have a lot of reflection or glare on them. So let's say you've got a lot of trees around the waterfall and they've got wet leaves. The polarizer is gonna allow you to remove the glare from those leaves, thus intensifying the native color of the foliage.

Another filter that I find very useful is known as a neutral density filter, and that's basically a gray filter, and they come in various strengths, and they're designed to block light coming into the sensor so that you can experiment with long exposure effects. So this is, for example, known as a three-stop filter, and it blocks a relatively little amount of light. Whereas this almost completely opaque filter is a 10-step filter, and this blocks a lotta light. So this allows you to extend your exposure times by cutting down on the light that's coming into the sensor. These filters come in different strengths that are expressed in terms of stops.

And each stop reduces the amount of light coming into the filter by one half. Finally, I use what's known as a graduated neutral density filter to help balance my exposures when I'm shooting sunrise or sunset. So this filter is similar to the neutral density filter in that part of the filter is darker, and it lets in less light, but the rest of the filter is clear, and there is a transition zone between the clear and the dark. And what this allows me to do is when I slide this filter into the filter holder, I can pull it down so that the transition zone comes down to the horizon. And what this does is it darkens the sky, but it keeps the landscape beneath the sky the same exposure value.

So that way I can balance the exposure between the sky and the landscape using the graduated neutral density filter.