You remember the National Association of Photoshop Professionals? NAPP? Their president, Scott Kelby, is like the Photoshop guy, he teaches Photoshop and Lightroom and travels all around the world doing seminars and evangelizing for Adobe (in an indirect way, as a representative of over 30,000 people who use Photoshop professionally). He’s as close to a Photoshop guru as you can realistically get before you become Thomas Knoll or Russell Brown.

What I’m trying to say here is that you really couldn’t learn Photoshop (or Lightroom) from any better folks than Scott Kelby and his Photoshop crew (Corey Barker, Pete Collins, RC Concepcion, and of course Matt Kloskowski). Normally this type of instruction costs a few bucks or at least a trip somewhere. But not this week.

This week only, presented in a live format, Scott and his crew (he calls them “The Photoshop Guys”) are doing a series of retouching presentations that you can watch for free. This starts tonight at 6 PM EST. The presentations are, in order:

• Wedding Retouching (tonight, Dec. 5)
• Digital Makeup (Dec. 6)
• The Next Level of Retouching (Dec. 7)
• LIVE Show – Audience Participation in Q&A (Dec. 8)
• Tips from the Industry (Dec. 9)

My understanding is that the fourth presentation is the only time that The Photoshop Guys will take any questions directly from the digital audience, but all five presentations will be streamed live.

To tune in, just visit Retouching Week on Photoshop User. It looks like the video and chat feeds are having some problems at the moment, but since the event has not yet started I’m sure the IT screw at Photoshop User will be able to work out all the bugs before it gets underway tonight at 6.

I don’t know about you guys but I’ll be tuned in!

Photography is awesome and I love it, but it’s super expensive sometimes. Photographers often commiserate with one another about the high price tags on tripods and ball heads (or sometimes they gloat, but the nice ones commiserate), and if you get into studio photography you are often getting into a whole new world of expenses from strobes and stands to backdrops and gels.

Now, it definitely pays off to have the right tools for the job, and that starts to become glaringly apparent when you’re doing work with people, but for so-called tabletop product photography you can often get by with some home improvement supplies and a little ingenuity and patience.

After the break, the resident product photographer and editor at Handmadeology shares a $12 product studio setup that yielded the image on the right.

Handmadeology is a blog owned by Tim Adam, a metalcrafts guy who started selling on the Etsy marketplace and wanted to share his tips and ideas with the Internet at large. Handmadeology is very focused on items to be found on Etsy and ideas for improving your sales through Etsy, but this particular post by contributing writer Mariano definitely overlaps into Single-Serving Photo territory.

Using a window, some paper, cardboard, a simple clamp, and aluminum foil, Mariano can get a very clean seamless image that you might think was taken in a cloud dome or using one of those infinity boards. Check out the link below to read Mariano’s full article and see how it was done.

Studio Quality Product Photography with a $12 Setup via Handmadeology

camera dial by Lee Reynolds

Being an excellent photographer is 50% vision and 50% technical prowess. Seeing the art all around you is only useful for the photographer who can capture it, and perfectly executing that capture means wrangling the piece of hardware you love so much, the camera.

These days, most photographers are shooting digital. Digital photography is freeing in a lot of ways, but it is also more complicated. Camera manufacturers have sought to close the gap between the pro and the semi-pro by providing all of these different shooting modes, and even though I still believe you only need three, it’s not unusual to see mode dials with 11 or 12 settings on them! You don’t need all those settings to get full control! Haje Jan Kamps helps me explain after the break.

I’ve written about this before in Be a Control Freak, but the subject came up again today when I saw Haje Jan Kamps’ really cool article, Translating the mode wheel on pixiq. My article explains in some amount of gory detail what each mode does, Haje takes it a step further with example images and a plea to leave those silly program modes behind.

Haje says:

This little dial is called your mode wheel, and it’s your mortal enemy, the destroyer of creativity, and the root of all evil in the world including, but not limited to, wars, swine flu, and stepping in chewing gum with a new pair of shoes.

Definitely hop over to pixiq and read Haje’s article, check out my previous article if you haven’t read it before, and if you are hankering for even more information…

Learn Tips and Tricks for Real-Life Shooting

These three books are among the most straightforward guides to the real-life application of camera settings in a broad variety of situations that I’ve come across. They’re written by Scott Kelby, the publisher and editor of Photoshop User and Layers magazines, president and co-founder of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, and founder of the eponymous training website (kelbytraining.com).

He’s written over 40 books. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve read these, and they’re awesome. They’re short, not too expensive, presented in plain language, and useful to photographers at nearly any skill level. The three books don’t progress in skill level or detail, they are simply three chapters of the same overall plot, so you can snag the one with the prettiest cover, flip a coin, or just buy all three.

Here are the three individual books, they’re each about 25 bucks or less, I think the second volume is the cheapest:

• The Digital Photography Book, Vol. 1
• The Digital Photography Book, Vol. 2
• The Digital Photography Book, Vol. 3

Or get them all together in this B&H kit. I think you save about $1.50, so I guess the kit is offered for convenience, but hey, convenience has gotta be worth something, right?

• The Digital Photography Book, Vols. 1-3 B&H Kit

They’re really swell books, and I don’t usually jump on the bandwagon when it comes to these sort of corporate “training mill” publishers but Scott knows what he’s talking about and presents it in a very clear way so I’d be doing you all a disservice not to recommend them to you.

Moreover, if you click through these links here, you get the same books for the same prices you would pay if you went straight to B&H’s website yourself, but I also get a tiny little commission that helps me keep this site online, so if you are even remotely thinking about picking up a book or two, please use these links and help me out.

Here’s a little taste of what the final product looked like using his techniques (this is a 100% crop of the final photo, click for the full size version):

Head over to Alex’s blog to see his lighting setup and read his tips on how to pull this off.

Whether you need this junk or not is a completely different question, and one that I could certainly answer for you, but I doubt you’d listen to me. Who am I, anyway, other than another guy who loves buying stuff he doesn’t need?

You know who you should listen to? Scott Bourne.

I’ve been writing this blog for a little over five years now, which seems like a long time to me, but Scott has been writing about and teaching photography for six times that long (yes, thirty years), so he deserves your attention for at least the next ten minutes… Which is all it’s going to take you to breeze through his newly updated DSLR Camera Lens Buying Guide on Photofocus.

Within the Guide, Scott offers tips for choosing what to buy and gives examples of each basic type of lens in both Canon and Nikon flavors.

For all of you Sony, Panasonic, Olympus, and Minolta shooters out there, don’t worry… I’m sure there’s another blog out there for you guys! Ha ha!

But seriously, these are good tips and you should listen to what Scott has to say, he speaks from immense experience.

Scott Bourne’s DSLR Camera Lens Buying Guide via Photofocus

Remember when I told you about that crazy remote-controlled robot carting a DSLR that these two British brothers would drive around Africa, taking up-close-and-personal photos of wild animals? It was called the BeetleCam, and it was the brainchild of William and Matthew Burrard-Lucas, two swiftly burgeoning wildlife photographers from the UK.

Well, they’re at it again, only this time they’re not using a remote-controlled dune buggy and they’re not photographing lions or elephants. They’re using an ingenious tabletop lighting setup and capturing the births of mosquito larvae.

See all of the amazing macro photos and read about the brothers’ technical process on their guest post on Digital Photography School!

Via Digital Photography School, via Burrard-Lucas.com

Why? Because there is more data in the brightest few stops of sensor attenuation than in the rest of the entire range, which is to say that there will be more detail, less banding, less noise, and so forth, within the brightest areas than there will be in the darkest ones. But you’ve observed that before, right? You’ve seen how terrible shadow areas can look when you try to brighten them up.

“It’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.“—Will Greenwald

Then there’s this guy Will Greenwald. He just posted a whole article about this in which he says “it’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.” Awesome, I agree. But neither of us are saying you should “blow out” any of your image; definitely don’t do that.

Strangely, most of the people who commented on Will’s article disagreed with him. Those people are amateurs.

Why would I say that? I don’t even know them, and I am not prone to hyperbole or dirt-kicking. I’m really not. I’m also sure that all of those people are well-versed, smart individuals. It’s just that… I guess they don’t “get around” much in digital photography circles.

You see, I know something they don’t, and I learned it from an article by Michael Reichmann written some time back around 2003. I don’t need to tell you who Michael Reichmann is, do I? This information is not bleeding edge, it’s not new news. When Chris Blake and I teach our photography workshops, which I plug on this blog shamelessly and regularly, one of the first things we talk about is “exposing to the right,” and we’ve been doing that for three years.

Michael’s article is titled, with tongue pressed firmly into cheek, Expose Right. He means “to the right of the histogram” as much as he means “correctly.” Read that article if you want all of the technical “nitty gritty” involved in digital sensor attenuation and so forth.

You’ll read about how Michael was chatting with Thomas Knoll. You know, the guy who wrote Photoshop. You’ll learn about how they came to agree upon the fact that more detail lives in the brightest areas of an image than in the darkest ones. That’s all you need to know. You don’t need to get any deeper into the technology in order to use this rule.

Okay, so…

How do you use this rule?

I’m glad you asked. This is all you need to remember.

If possible, increase your image’s overall exposure until the histogram touches the right edge.

There are plenty of reasons that you may not be able to do that including subject motion, lack of light, and so on. Do the best you can. Tend toward the right of the histogram.

The image shouldn’t be clipped, which means that if your camera shows little blinking spots where things are overexposed, that’s still bad, but get that graph to move over to the right as far as you can without compromising the image.

If, like me, you operate in aperture-priority or aperture-value mode (Canon Av, Nikon A) all you have to do is use your “exposure value,” or EV, setting to increase the exposure of the image as far as you can up until the histogram data touches the right edge of the graph. If you can’t get it all the way over there without compromising the shot, don’t worry about it. This is a rule of thumb only.

Then what?

Then you take your photos home and import them into Lightroom and use the Develop module to adjust the overall brightness of the image using the exposure slider and curves and anything else you need to until it looks good to you. That’s really it.

Here are some things that you are going to complain about, and why you shouldn’t:

• On your camera’s LCD screen, an image exposed to the right may look very bright, and may look desaturated. It’s OK. There is just as much color data in the image as there was when it was center-exposed, and when you bring it into Lightroom you can draw that color out, but this time with more detail than ever.

Okay, so that was only one complaint. If you have other complaints, leave them down there in the comments!

Do you expose to the right already? Do you like it? Do you hate it? Leave a comment and let us all know!

To say that photographing the fireworks display in Washington, D.C. is a challenge might be hyperbole. Compared to those in Boston and New York City, which I’ve photographed two times each, getting a reasonable spot to shoot from is a cakewalk.

The National Mall opens at around 10 AM, but even at 3 PM there are still plenty of good spots by the Lincoln Memorial, so there’s no need to hurry. The real challenge, it would seem, is the complete and total lack of information about the strategy and considerations of shooting in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Have you ever searched for photographs of the D.C. fireworks? You should give it a try. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

There aren’t many. That is to say, there aren’t many great ones. It seems as though Getty and other stock agencies own most of the truly decent shots that exist. There are a few out there by random bloggers, or that you may find on Flickr, but it isn’t a landslide such as you will find when you search for New York City fireworks photos.

Where, When?

Okay, so there are enough shots to know where you want to shoot from, at least; there are a couple of decent opportunities. Many of the “classic” shots are made from the Tidal Basin near the Jefferson Memorial. From there you can frame a shot with the Potomac in the foreground and the Washington Memorial, Capitol, and Lincoln Memorial as your main subjects.

For a closer vantage, any of the areas around the front of the Lincoln Memorial should be ripe for the picking, and that’s where I shot from this year. You can almost tell where I was located when I took the photo below.

Reports of when the crowds start to accumulate around the National Mall are hard to find. Depending upon who you ask, you get entirely different answers. In order to best maximize the opportunity (for which I spent the better part of a day in a car from Connecticut), I decided to get to the National Mall as early as possible.

Things I totally didn’t have to do:

• Get to the National Mall as early as possible,
• Sit at the location I wanted to shoot from for 10 hours under the 97-degree sun,
• Forget to bring a folding chair.

So let me give all you guys and gals out there a hint. You don’t have to get to the National Mall ten hours early to snag a good location to photograph the fireworks display from. Unlike Boston and New York City, which both require a photographer’s attendance ten or more hours in advance, you can probably do very well at 3 PM in most places.

This is where the information bottleneck becomes the limiting reagent in the complex experiment of great Washington, D.C. fireworks photos. If only someone had told me, reliably, that I could get to the National Mall at 3 PM, would stand in essentially no line to go through the security checkpoint, and could still set up my tripod almost anywhere I wished… That would have been nice.

Oh, right, security checkpoints, I almost forgot.

Security Checkpoints

Before the 4th of July celebration, an enormous fence is erected around the entire National Mall. In order to get in, you will have to pass through one of the security checkpoints placed around the perimeter and be subjected to a search. At least, this was the gist of what my research turned up when looking into the logistics of this little photographic adventure.

Here’s what you actually have to know, based on my experience:

They don’t actually care what you bring in.

No knives, explosives, or personal grills. No glass bottles, thermonuclear weapons, chainsaws, etc. No alcohol, either (officially), but if you want to bring around nineteen coolers of food and drinks, a tent canopy, a load of chairs, towels, beach balls, and anything else you can reasonably carry, yeah, they’ll let you in.

Suffice it to say, a huge camera bag and a tripod isn’t going to be an issue, despite online warnings of “they won’t let you in with a bag,” etc., etc. They will need to look inside your bag, but it’s cursory and they aren’t even allowed to touch anything. They will use a wooden stick to poke around and make sure they can see everything inside.

It’s fast.

I was lined up with everyone else by 9:30 on the 4th, waiting for the security sweep of the park to complete and the checkpoints to open. That was the largest line I was ever in, and I was through within 10 minutes of when it opened up. I left the park area and came back in the early afternoon and essentially walked through without waiting at all. So don’t sweat the lines.

Crowd control. It’s an illusion.

Whenever you’re photographing fireworks, no matter what the location or occasion, you have to learn to hold your ground. Whether it’s another photographer or a particularly ambitious spectator, people will encroach on your space if you don’t make your boundaries known. Fortunately for you, the intrepid Washington D.C. fireworks photographer, you won’t have to deal with any serious crowd issues until around 5 or 6 PM. That’s when you’re going to start getting surrounded.

This is all very foreign to me, with experience only in the “Big Apple” and “Beantown.” I assumed that by the time the gates opened, a sea of tripods and camera bags would stretch out before me, blanketing every good vantage point imaginable… And that simply was not so.

Comparatively, photographing the fireworks show in Washington, D.C. was one of the easiest fireworks shows I have ever photographed.

Well, that’s coming to an end.

What you’re about to read is a totally inclusive, top-to-bottom, front-to-back workflow for organizing, sorting, and managing your digital photos using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Similar techniques will, I’m sure, apply to Apple Aperture, though all keyboard shortcuts and terminology will be Lightroom-specific.

For the record, I use Lightroom on a Mac and chose it because of Adobe’s openness to beta testing and feedback from the photography community, which I believe has made Lightroom the best tool for the job. Let’s get to it.

Organizing Files on Disk

First, why? Why organize your files on disk when Lightroom is such an apt cataloging tool? Why add another layer of complexity to your photo import workflow when Lightroom can just “take care of it,” assuring you that each RAW file is placed in a location appropriate to its metadata?

Because that’s totally wrong, that’s why. Lightroom is an amazing cataloging and organizational tool, but what if you couldn’t use it? What if your catalog, and its backup, and the backup’s backup, got destroyed? Or what if your operating system was in some state of utter bedlam, preventing you from opening Lightroom at all? Or what if you brought your external drive full of photos with you on a trip and found out that Lightroom on your laptop wouldn’t work?

Applying at least some moderate level of organization to your physical RAW files will make finding them that much easier if you ever have to do so without the aid of Lightroom. Surely not an eventuality we all hope for, but one that we should nonetheless plan for.

My Method

There are an infinite number of ways to organize your RAW files on disk, but I don’t have an infinite amount of time (and neither do you) so I will only tell you how I do it.

1. My top-level folder is called “Photography,” then
2. Within that folder there are three folders for the main categories of my work, “Events,” “Places,” and “Portraits.”
   1. Events contains folders named for each event and those folders contain the photos.
   2. Portraits contains folders usually of models’ names, and those folders contain photos. If I have done more than one shoot with a model, there are folders by date for those.
   3. Places, however, contains a geographical hierarchy like “United States,” then “California,” then “Death Valley NP,” and
      1. As with portraits, if I’ve been to a location more than once, there are folders by date.

I know that list might be a little bit complicated to absorb, so go ahead and re-read it if you want to. The basic idea is to have your major categories represented as folders on your hard drive such that you can locate, at the very least, the group of photos you’re looking for in the event you can’t use your catalog for it.

Enlisting Lightroom’s Help

You can get Lightroom to help you build this structure. Let me tell you what I would do if I were importing photos from a location shoot that I did in a place I had never photographed before.

1. Open the import dialog and choose the photos I want to import from the thumbnail view.
2. Choose “Copy Photos To A New Location And Add To Catalog.”
3. Browse for the correct geographical folder. I usually use the browse dialog to create the folders I need along the way. For example, I might browse into “Places,” then “United States,” and then I may have to create a folder for “Massachusetts,” and then another within that for “Boston.” There is a “Make New Folder” or “Make Folder” button in the dialog (in Windows and OS X, respectively).
4. In the future, if I already have the state folder created, I may simply select that and check off the box next to “Put in subfolder” and type the city or location name in there. That’s completely up to you.
5. If you want to organize the photos by date within the folder you’ve selected (and this precludes using the “subfolder” option above), select “Organize: By Date” and Lightroom will create a subfolder for each date in your import (by the photo’s created date).

A quick side-note: this is the time to select your metadata preset and choose some basic keywords to apply to all the photos you’re importing. This article isn’t really about keywording, but that won’t stop me from giving you orders: keyword your photos. That is all.

Awesome! Now all of your RAW files are organized in a coherent way on your hard drive. But you still have thousands of new photos that you just imported and unless you’re Ansel Adams they’re not all keepers. Actually, even if you were Ansel Adams, they still wouldn’t all be keepers. So what you need to is treat your catalog like an emergency room.

Treat Your Catalog Like an Emergency Room

What I’m talking about is triage.

tri • age n.

1. The determination of priorities for action in an emergency.
2. Sweeping through your photos and separating the good from the bad.

Obviously the second definition is not exactly Miriam Webster material, but… I reserve the right to exercise my creative liberty.

Anyway, the idea is to prioritize photos by their quality so you can spend more time sorting through the really good ones and less time staring at the really bad ones. Doctors do this in emergency situations to make sure that patients who most need care get it first, to maximize the survival rate. For a doctor, determining priority among patients can be a real challenge, and prioritizing your photos can be tricky, too.

Luckily, Lightroom gives us some very helpful tools that come to our aid in this situation. You probably already know of them. They are:

1. Flags (picks and rejects)
2. Ratings (on a scale from one star to five)
3. Labels (colors)

Any given photo can have a flag (picked or rejected), a rating (one through five stars), and a color label, although all three attributes are optional. By default, a photo has no flag, no rating, and no color label.

With two possible flags, five possible ratings, and five possible color labels, that’s a whopping 50 potential categorizations a photo could fall into (if you use all three attributes)! So how can you best put these attributes to use to streamline your workflow?

I don’t know. But I can tell you how I use them.

My Method

The very high-level outline of my process goes something like this:

1. Eliminate rejects (using the reject flag, “X” on the keyboard)
2. Mark potential keepers (using the pick flag, “P” on the keyboard)
3. Light, experimental development to test the viability of the keepers
4. Un-flag bad picks (if development doesn’t work out; that’s “U” on the keyboard)
5. Complete development
   1. Label completed images ready to go to the gallery in green (green for gallery, get it?)
   2. Label experimental or fun images that will go to Flickr in blue (no mnemonic device for that one, I have a Post-It note on my monitor to remind me)

I then I use either the Export to Photoshelter or Jeffrey’s Export to Flickr plugins within Lightroom to send the images where they need to go.

You may notice that I don’t use star ratings at all. I used to use star ratings to differentiate between images to throw away, edit, or which had been completed, but since the advent of flagging and color labels I find that star ratings provide more specificity than I need. There are only rare occasions when I have a few photos that are very similar where I might use star ratings to indicate which ones I like more, just so I can remember later when I come back to them, but that isn’t part of my everyday workflow.

You’re Done!

You have absorbed my entire workflow and read all of my suggestions for using Lightroom’s sorting and cataloging tools. I hope that this helps you to keep your images in order!

Have you heard of the fabled “neutral density” filter before? Whether or not you know what one is, I’m about to blow the lid off this mysterious piece of kit, totally demystify the nineteen (well, four…) ways their strengths are measured, and give you some awesome tips for using them effectively in the field.

Starting from the top, what exactly is an ND filter, anyway?

What Exactly Is an ND Filter, Anyway?

ND stands for “neutral density.” “Density” refers to optical density or absorbance. The absorbance of a substance is basically the amount of light it will absorb as opposed to the amount that will pass through it. By “neutral” we mean that the absorbance of the filter is the same across all wavelengths of light.

To put it in simpler terms, ND filters only transmit some fraction of the light that hits them, and when the light comes out the other side the colors should be completely unaffected. Okay, so that’s great, but why do we care?

As you may recall from reading Mastering the Only Five Camera Settings, there is only so much you can do to change the characteristics of the scene you’re capturing.

When I wrote that article, I wasn’t making stuff up; those five settings are really the only ones. By adding an ND filter into the mix, however, you add another variable you can control. We love control, don’t we?

In effect, adding an ND filter is most similar to reducing your ISO sensitivity, which may be the only way to get slower shutter speeds in situations where light is ample and your ISO is already as low as it can go. So then the next question is, why do you want slower shutter speeds?

Why Do You Want Slower Shutter Speeds?

The most often cited reason is to get the “veiling effect” that water produces during a longer exposure. Normally, you might have to go out just after dawn or wait until dusk before the conditions would be right to make a several-second exposure of a natural waterfall.

Check out the awesome photo on the right from skycaptaintwo. Without an ND filter it could be challenging to get the low-light situation that would make that photo possible. Now, I don’t know for sure that this photographer used an ND filter, but the image is a great example of where having one might definitely come in handy.

There are three main reasons for using an ND filter that I know of (but I’m sure you can think of more):

1. To get a “veiling effect” when photographing water (this works for waterfalls as well as the water’s moving surface, e.g. the ocean, lakes)
2. To capture a sense of movement by adding motion blur (e.g. when people are walking around, cars driving by, and so on)
3. To get an increased depth of field (more background blur, or “bokeh”) when light is ample

The first two require slower shutter speeds, the last requires a larger aperture opening. All three necessarily require that more light enter the camera, which is why you may need to use an ND filter to reduce the amount of light that enters in order to keep your exposure correct.

Swell. Now we know all about what ND filters are for. But how do you size them up? ND filter specifications can be pretty confusing. That’s why I will explain ND filter specifications to you now.

ND Filter Specifications, Explained

There are four measures that can be used to describe how much light an ND filter blocks and/or transmits, and they are:

1. Attenuation factor (or “filter factor”)
2. Optical density (or “grade”)
3. F-stop equivalence
4. Percent transmittance

Only two of the above are regularly used to describe filters when you’re buying them (grade and density), but it can be helpful to know the others to get a better idea of what it all means. Some sites, like B&H, may also list the remaining stats in the “specifications” tab for each product, though the product title itself will only contain one of the four measurements.

The filter factor or attenuation factor is used often when labeling a filter product. Generally it’s written as “ND8” or “ND64.” The optical density or grade is also commonly used, and will always appear as a decimal number, “0.3” or “3.0” and so on. Just to be completely clear, a filter labeled ND1000 is equivalent to a filter labeled ND 3.0. They are exactly the same.

Now, technically, filters above a 1,000 grade exist. You aren’t going to see them around too often, and I’ll tell you one reason why. With an ND1000, or ND 3.0 filter, you’re blocking out 10 stops of light, which means you’re only receiving 0.1% of the total light in the scene. The ND1000 filter looks like a disk of black glass; you can barely see through it with your naked eyes. When using an ND1000 filter, you have to compose and focus your scene on a tripod and then screw on the filter, because once it’s on you won’t be able to see anything at all, unless you’re pointing directly at the sun… And why would you do that?

Let’s Talk Brands

Filters made by B+W are among the best quality you can buy; the the materials used and the fit and finish are top notch. An ND1000 filter from B+W can run $100 or more.

If you are a Canon “L” or Nikon “Nikkor” shooter, you require a 77mm diameter filter. Here are some nice ones made by B+W from my favorite store, B&H:

• B+W ND 0.3, $49 (same as ND2, 1 f-stop)
• B+W ND 0.6, $49 (same as ND4, 2 f-stops)
• B+W ND 0.9, $94 (same as ND8, 4 f-stops)
• B+W ND 3.0, $97 (same as ND1000, 10 f-stops)

You will find the biggest selection of filters from B+W and Tiffen. Tiffen makes reasonably priced and solidly performing glass filters. You may also want to look at Cokin or Heliopan.

One thing to note when shopping for filters is that a brand like B+W offers each of their ND filters with a variety of options such as a multi-coated surface to reduce flares and ghosting, or in a slim form factor for better performance on wide-angle lenses. Prices vary depending upon the options.

Let’s Talk… Brands… Again

An important thing to think about when you’re looking at adding filters to your kit is the combination of different brands of threaded filters. Although filter threading is standardized, you can sometimes run into trouble when you screw a B+W ND filter onto the front of a Canon UV filter, and so on. Mixing and matching brands is somewhat discouraged.

If you don’t use UV filters (a subject for another post entirely), or if you don’t intend to stack effect filters, then buy whatever brands fit your needs and budget.

Happy filtering!