Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

One of the key ingredients of landscape photography is exposure control. Graduated filters allow broad level compensation for bright skies, gradiated light across a scene, etc. Many people start by using Cokin graduated filters, which are notoriously non-neutral. The two ‘recommended’ brands, according to weight of opinion, are Lee and Singh Ray. Lee definitely have the larger market in the UK wheras Singh Ray are popular in the US (and can only be ordered from the US directly).

I recently took a photograph at Saltwick Nab and was tempted to use a Singh Ray 0.9 reverse grad (dark stripe in middle, lightening to 0.6 at top of filter) but when I saw the back of my digital camera, there appeared to be a colour shift. I decided to use a Lee 0.9H. I was worried about the colour and when somebody asked why I hadn’t use a reverse grad, I though it worth checking.

I put the grads up against my monitor and then made a visual match against the grad colour which gave the result below (I’ve added a neutral band next to each grad for comparison).

The Singh Ray definitely have a blue/green tinge and the Lee a less saturated yellow/red tinge. My Lee 0.6H was very neutral in comparison.. It’s also worth noting that the Singh Ray 1.2 hard grad has an gradiation across the supposedly solid bit that is about 2/3 of a stop.

Conclusions? Well, the Singh ray aren’t quite as bad as I though but I think the problem was exasperated by the Lee 0.9 tending toward a yellow whereas the 0.9Rev tends toward the green. I think I will have to try an A/B test against the Singh Ray reverse and the Lee 0.9H. The 1.2H will be going back to Singh Ray to see what happens..

UPDATE: I took a picture of my grads on my light table which is 5500K and got the following

Checking the above on my light table, the only neutral grad I have is the 0.6H from Lee.. The rest of the grads from Lee are pretty close but all very slightly warm (measuring 2 points of saturation for every stop of filtration). The Singh Ray grads were well out though. They were both tending towards a strong Cyan cast with the 1.2H measuring 7 points of saturation from every stop of filtration (for a total of 28 points in photoshop HSB). The 0.9Rev was a little better with 6 points of saturation for every stop but the colour varied from cyan at the 9 end to green at the 6 end.. I will still try these out with film, especially now I now what the cast is so that I can make an appropriate correction if necessary.