On my recent holiday in Devon I discovered just how useful a Neutral Density (ND) filter can be. While I was there I was trying to take pictures of waterfalls there I wanted to try out the effect of making the water look silky smooth. To do this I needed an extended exposure time so that all the movement blurred out. I minimised the size of the aperture that I was using to reduce the amount of light entering, however I could still only use a shutter speed of about 0.3 of a second, and this just wasn’t producing the effect I wanted.

To get around this I have recently discovered ND filters, they are dark glass filters that reduces the amount of light getting through by a number of stops. You can get them in varying strengths depending on how much you want to reduce the light by. For what I wanted to do they were prefect as they allowed me to increase the shutter time to about 1.5 seconds and hence blur all the water producing a very nice effect.

Also connected to ND filters are ND Grad filters. These perform the same effect, reducing the amount of light, however they are clear at one side, dark at the other and graduated in-between. These can be useful if you want to take sunsets and still have foreground details, since the sky will be very bright. I plan to add these to my list of camera accessories that I want.

Another place I want to try using an ND filter is at the coast, to create the same silky water effect.

Finally I recently read in a magazine that ND filters can be good for taking photos in crowded places. Set up and use a dark ND filter so that you can extend the shutter time to 15 or 30 seconds without over exposing. That way all the moving people in the picture will magically disappear!

Below are some of the photos I have taken using this effect, you can clearly see the difference the ND filter makes, allowing a longer exposure for the better silky water image, while not causing over-exposure.

Do check back again soon as I will be adding pictures from Devon shortly.