ND Filters.....A Learning Curve

I've been working with two new filters I bought for my camera.  I have 4 filters now, the first was the clear UV protection that everyone should own to protect their lens.  After all, after the camera the most expensive part of your arsenal for photography is the lens.  My lens isn't the most expensive by any means, Tamron 18-270mm DiII VCD, but it was more than my first camera that I put it on.  Now that I've upgraded my camera they run neck and neck.  I digress....I then purchased a circular polarizing filter to assist the camera in real bright midday lighting to get better colors.  Now I have two more filters.  They are the ND Neutral Density 0.6 and 0.9.  These help with clarity, like looking for the fish in the water commercials or cutting through the haze of the day when the humidity is so high.  They also add depth by darkening the shadows and you can take still shots and have motion.  This is when you put the camera on a tripod, set the shutter speed to something longer than stop action 60 or above and what ever moves in the focus plane of the lens is blurred.  Good example would be a waterfall.  You can take pictures where you see the drops of water and only assume motion or you can use these filters and get various types of motion from yea it's there to what looks like soft snow.  Personally, I don't like the latter. 

This was taken on a bright afternoon, with a lot of wind.  I set the camera up on a tripod, opened the f-stop to let vary little light in and then lengthened the shutter speed to over a minute.  I had the .9  ND filter on due to the amount of light.  The house is stationary while the smoke tree in the foreground is showing movement.  I also converted the color picture to b/w.  All editing was done in LR 5 except for resizing and file extension.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this photo I used the .9 and the .6 ND filters since I was shooting into the light.  As you can see, the bottom of the clouds was darkened, the sun was able to give a flare of light as it was peeking around the umbrella.  I did use the graduation tool in LR 5 from the upper right corner to somewhere below the sun.  This was for me to be able to light the green grass in the bottom of the picture.  Other than that it is pretty much right out of the camera.