My friend, Chris lent me Cokin graduated ND filter to try.
I went out Sunday evening to take some shots with the filter, and I liked the job which the filter did. I can now shoot the sky and the land without compromising the exposure between the two.
I was using some blu-tack to hold the filter in place as I didn't have a filter holder. I was still able to take shots with the set up, but it was too fiddly to do especially when you were loosing light around you and mosquitoes were buzzing around my face.
So, I went to a local camera shop today and picked up Cokin P-series filter holder. They let me try two filter holders, standard one and one for wider angle lens. The standard one has three slots to hold different filters which is nice, but it appears that with my 24mm lens, a tiny amount of the image gets chopped off at each corner because of the thickness of the filter holder.
So, in the end, I bought the wide angle filter holder (BPW400). It only holds one filter, but it doesn't have the vignetting problem on 24mm. It appears that I can even stack the square filter holder on top of a normal screw-in PL filter without causing light fall. This means that I can use either a combination of PL and ND grad filter or a set of a circular screw-in ND (like ones Kenko makes) and Square ND grad. I think, having only one filter slot doesn't seem to be bad after all.
Here is a comparison between a shot without a filter and a shot with filters (Cokin 121S and Kenko circular PL) .
Speaking of screw-in filters, I have been using Kenko Zeta filters. I got circular PLs, clear protection filters, and ND8. The clear filters control flare better than my old cheap Kenko and Hoya filtesr do. I don't know what other tows are like compared against filters from B&W, Tiffen, etc, but I am happy with them since they are pretty thin and not causing vignetting on my wide angle lens. Also I got these filters from Japan and the prices over there are good. Filters are very expensive in Australia, I find.
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