Singh-Ray filter recommendation

A question for the filter experts here...

I am about to purchase a couple of Singh-Ray ND grad filters. I am planning on the 2-stop hard grad and a 3-stop soft grad. Do you think those would be the most useful if I can only get two for now? These would be used primarily for sunset/sunrise work, or other high contrast, wide-angle scenes. I've been getting by with a 1 stop screw-on filter and PS processing, but I want to expand my horizons.

If it helps, I shoot with a Canon 30D and the 10-22 mm EF-S or 17-85 EF-S for most landscape work.

If anyone has experience with these filters and would be able to make some recommendations, I would greatly appreciate it!

Jason

I have two and three stop hard and soft. Frankly, they get a lot more shelf time than lens time. Get one and see how much you use it before you plunk down the money for the Singh-Rays. They're indispensable when you absolutely have to have them, but that is so infrequent for me (no snow covered peaks in GA) that I'm usually caught without them and have to do multiple exposures and muck it up with PS.

I went the other way. 3 hard, 2 soft. It depends on what you primarily use them with. Though I live in the foothills, I do more beach and flat landscape shooting than mountains. so that's why I use the hard filter a lot more than soft. For mountains, soft filters are generally more effective as it's rare to find a straight line to put the filter at.

the first GND I bought was a 2-stop soft, based on recomendations of folks here that this would be a good filter for general usage, a good choice to start with. Next I got a 3-stop hard. I found it to be much more useful that the 2-stop soft. Then I got a 2-stop hard. I use the 2- and 3- stop hard edge filters about the same.

I shoot in a relatively flat landscape. The hard edge GNDs are indispensible. I seldom use the 2-stop soft-edge (almost never).

Hope my experience is useful to you.

Jason,

I have 2 - 2 stop (hard and soft edge as well as 2 - 3 stop hard and soft. I find myself asking why I don't have a reverse GND filter in my bag. Seems that often the sun is down or hewading that way and the sky is darker then the horizon so my hard stops render the sky to dark and my soft are not effective fo the same reason.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I don't often shoot flat landscapes with a straight line, so I am thinking about going with the 2 and 3 stop soft grads for now. Odds are, I'll end up getting the hard grads soon enough.

For your purposes I would buy the 2 & 3 stop SOFT grads. I live at the beach so hard grads are very useful here because I have a hard horizon line, but in the mountains I would think soft grads would be much more useful. Before buying them however, I would determine whether you really need a regular soft grad or perhaps the REVERSE grad. Look at your images and see where you really need the darkening (low or high), and then spend your money on the appropriate filter. As I become more proficient in double and triple processing my RAW files, I find that I use my grads less and less, so I would also consider that option (much cheaper than SR grads!). Still, a grad can be very nice at times.

Just wanted to add something since you mentioned you had a fairly wide angle lens, I have a 17-40 lens (77mm filter size) with a full frame sensor on my camera and originally bought the Cokin P filter holder but found that it caused vignetting and I ended up swicthing to a Cokin Z (or Lee filter holder) that uses 4x6 filters.