I don't know how serious you are about filters or how far down the road you want to go.
You can get filters with very little outlay, but at a cost in quality, or spend a great deal on them to get top quality.
I don't know your budget...but we can have a wee chat about the topic.
The serious landscape photographer will have four filters in his bag........more if you want to get into fancy colour effects, soft focus scenes etc. But lets stick with the basics for now.
The four to carry are :-
Haze or skykight
Polariser
Warm up
ND graduated...................and of these, for landscape work, this last is arguably the most important.
These are for colour work........black and white photographers will also have red, orange, and yellow contrast boosters.
The haze/skylight will keep a little of any mist out of the image but are used by most people as lens protectors.......screwed on full time they will protect the front lens element from knocks and scratches.
Such a filter will have no effect on exposure values.
The polariser when used properly will saturate colours and eliminate reflections. Also when set to their fullest power can act as a ND filter, holding back light by about two steps. At it's lowest power it will hold back light by about one stop, so
slower shutter speeds or wider apertures will come into play....a polariser will most times require you to use a tripod.
There are two types of polariser......linear and circular. This does not refer to their actual shape ( they are all round) but to the manner in which the light bending surface is applied to the glass.
For your camera, you would want a circular polariser.
Warm up filters do just that...warm up the scene.
If you take an image at noon on the hottest day of the year.......you are shooting in a very cold, blue light. The colour temperature of the light is very low. Imagine a sunset..all red and warm looking, high colour temperature. Midday blue, low
colour temperature.
The warm up counteracts that and brings the colours in the scene back to what the eye can see.
This filter does the same job as the white balance adjustment in your digicam can do. If you set the digicam white balance to the sunny icon, it will place a digital warm up filter over the image.
So, why is TD going on about buying a warm up filter if there is already the form of one in the camera ?
Well, it's quite simple. However cold or warm the light you are experiencing, however low or high is the colour temperature......the white balance control will apply the same amount of warm up on all occasions.
I prefer to control my own image result by switching off the camera white balance thing and applying my own degree of warm up........I have three warm up filters of varying strengths which I use singly or in combo to achieve that effect.
By the way, if you use a polariser filter in any temperature of light situation it will cool down the image. Most polariser user will also apply a warm up filter to the same image.
ND graduated filter...........to me, the most important, most used and most effective filter that the landscape photographer can have in his arsenal.
How often to you see landscapes where you have a perfectly exposed foreground...topped by a washed out sky. Or a beautiful vibrant sky with the supporting foreground being so dark that you cannot see any detail.
Banish such horrors to the dustbin of history........use an HD grad filter..
The problem is that the dynamic range of your ( my, all) camera is simply not wide enough to cope with the brightness of the sky and the relative darkness of the foreground at one and the same time. It cannot give a perfect exposure for two
extremely different lighting situations at the same time.......again, at mid day in mid summer, the sky can be as much as nine times brighter than the ground.
An ND graduated filter has a dark grey area at the top fading (graduation) to clear at the bottom. The trick is to adjust it so that the grey area covers the sky and the clear area covers the ground.....the grey holds back some of the light from the
sky and brings the whole into the camera esposure range again.......result (when used properly) perfectly exposed sky and foreground.
Again, the filters come in different strengths.......I have three 1 stop, 2 stop and 3 stop which I can use use singly or in combo to get the desired effect. Put a 3 stop job on when photographing in rain and gloom in Glencoe and be blown away with
the dramatic, dark, looming skies you get.!
Now then.....to buying filters.
There are two types of filter available....round ones which screw into the front of the lens and square/rectangular ones which are inserted into a holder itself screwed into the lens filter ring.
If you are happy to restrict yourself to haze/polariser/warm up filters then the round screw in ones are fine...............if you are going to go for ND gratuated instead or as well as...get the square ones in the holder.
Why does TD say this, I hear you cry.
Well..........with an ND grad, think of it's position if it is a round screw in one. It will always rest on the same point on the thread, and the graduated effect will therefore always be in the same position relative to the lens and thus the image.
However, with a square one in a holder,you can slide the filter up and down within the holder, rotate the holder, turn it on it'd side, turn it upside down. In other words, the square job in a holder gives an infinite amount of adjustment options that
the round, screw-in, static job just cannot do. And of course with this amount of adjustment, you can place the graduation just where you want it.
If then you want ND grads., buy square ones...and if you are going to the expense of buying square holder...you may as well have square filters for all needs, except for the haze/skylight. Get a round one and leave it on all the time as a protector.
Oh, and a polariser for use in a square holder will still be round......you rotate it to get the polarising effect.
There something to ponder over. .........
