Your equipment includes a packet holding some colored filters: green, orange, red, and polarizing. These offer some wonderful opportunities to control contrast of specific colors in your black-and-white landscape photos, once you understand how they work. This exercise involves taking 20 shots of the same scene, but changing the filter every four shots.
Step I
Load a roll of 100 ASA film, 18 exposures.
Step II
With your filter kit, go to the rear of MLC, near the loading dock.
Step III
This is an exercise in comparison, in comparing the effects of different filters. To do this, first locate a picture that contains the following elements:
Lots of blue sky, preferably with fluffy white clouds
Lots of green foliage
Some close things (like green foliage)
Some far-away things (like Leahi, Puowaina, etc.)
Step IV
Make sure that you are not shooting into the sun, that direct sunlight is not hitting the glass of the front of your lens. Meter carefully: take separate sky and ground readings and make sure that the average reading falls between those two.
Step V
Take off the yellow-green filter that came with your camera and take three shots of the scene with no filter on the lens.
Step VI
Put the yellow-green filter back on and take three shots of the scene you selected.
Step VII
Take off the yellow-green filter and put it in a safe place, like the filter pouch.Put on the green filter and take three pictures of your scene.
Step VIII
Remember that you need to rotate the polarizing filter to benefit from the polarizing effect. You can select the degree of polarizing effect based on how much you rotate the filter, but for this exercise, select the maximum effect.
Step IX
Do the same thing with all the filters. Note the order in which you take the shots. Label the shots on the contact sheet with the first letter of the filter: O, YG, R, P and N (for no filter).
What should you see?
Your blue sky should appear increasing dark, with greater contrast between sky and clouds. The green filter should have slightly darkened the sky and lightened the green foliage. The red filter should turn blue sky almost black, for a dramatic effect. The polarizing filter should have a similar effect.