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I’ve been playing around a bit more with some long exposure photography, and after reading this post by Alex Wise am wondering if I should invest in a graduated neutral density filter?

So far, for waterscapes,  I’ve instead been relying on combining multiple images to balance the exposure for the sky and the foreground, like in this image:

In the above shot I used two images, one with a 30 second exposure for the sky, and another with a 1 minute exposure for the foreground. This takes a little bit of messing about, as it requires at least two good exposures, and then round-tripping out of Aperture into Photoshop to combine the images, which is another fiddly exercise (although I could possibly try out some of the automated HDR apps or plugins for Aperture).

Alternatively, where the exposure difference between the sky and the foreground isn’t too great it is possible, using a RAW image, to adjust the exposure of one element without affecting the other, a task that is now substantially easier with the new brushes in Aperture 3 (which includes edge detection). The following image is an example of this where the shot was exposed for the foreground and the sky darkened in post using the ‘burn’ brush:

So, although it looks like many people turning out great waterscape / long exposure shots using graduated neutral density filters, my question is, is it worth the outlay of another several hundred dollars, or should I persevere with software solutions? If anyone has any thoughts on this I’d be interested to hear.