Focus on Equipment: Graduated ND Filters

After a long time last week I went out to take landscape photos. Here is what came out of it. A problem of landscape photography is that often the sky is a lot brighter than the ground, resulting in the sky being washed out or the ground coming out pitch dark. A graduated neutral density (ND) filter allows to compensate the difference of contrast and obtain a more balanced photo. Here is an example of the same scene without and with a filter:

Our club has a set of these filters (which are produced from Cokin), with several adapters for different lens sizes, and they can be borrowed from our equipment officer.