Grad filters

[David Ellison]

I've used Grads for many years in landscape stills photography and understand the principles but with motion isn't there issues with
things like panning, tilting and people in the shot?
Moving your camera whilst using a grad would that not introduce certain elements of your frame into the darkened image that you may not want
also the same goes for people, say shooting a person on a field and you wanted to use a grad on a bright sky would that also not put your
subject into the ND area?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Yes, those are the limitations of using grads in a motion picture, but there are some workarounds. There are ways to move the grad in the matte box during a camera move, for example, though more likely today the grad would be done in post so that it can be tracked and moved (and if you can pull a key around the subject, like a luminance key on the sky, the post grad could be applied behind them without cutting through them.) Where grads in-camera are still useful is when they reduce the brightness of something that would otherwise have some clipping problems. Otherwise, if no detail is clipped, then doing the grad in post is more common.

 

[David Battistella]

One some landscapes you can get away with pans, but pan tilts are a bit of a nogo. The method David suggests for this is best. I still like to use grads in landscapes just to clamp the DR in a shot and get the exposure evened out a bit.

funny, I just re screened Barry Lyndon and saw a fair bit of grads used on exteriors. It's all about maintaining the horizon.

Cheers,

battistella

 

[David Mullen ASC]

"Barry Lyndon" even used a vertical grad for an interior to darken a white wall, according the John Alcott (I don't know which shot he was referring to.) I noticed a vertical grad to darken a row of daylight windows on one side of the frame in an opening scene in "Amadeus". Soderbergh used grads to darken the top of the frame for a lot of the Earth flashbacks in "Solaris".

Storaro used gold and blue grads a lot in "Sheltering Sky" to increase the colors of the desert and sky. And even more extreme use of grads is often seen in the work of Slawomir Idziak, like in "The Double Life of Veronique".