I find it highly amusing when I hear photographers spout on about how filters are redundant in this digital age because Photoshop does everything they can do, only better. It’s common knowledge that you can produce perfect landscapes by taking two shots of the same scene, one exposing for the sky and another for the land itself, then combining the two instead of using an ND grad. You can also mimic the effect of an ND filter by adding motion to an image using Photoshop filters, or boost contrast and deepen the sky like a polarizer does using Levels and Curves.

But Photoshop can’t do everything filters can, and even if it could, would you rather be a photographer or a computer geek? I personally prefer to spend as much time as possible on location shooting images than chained to my Apple Mac processing them, which means I like to get my shots as close to finished in-camera so they require minimal editing. Filters help me to achieve that, so I use them.

The coloured filters we once used to control contrast when shooting black & white film are redundant, because their effects can be added digitally at the click of a mouse. However, there are several types of filter that you should seriously consider – read my tips on getting the most out of them in B+W 303.