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I have decided to have a go at some landscape photography and purchased a cokin nd grey grad filter. Will this allow me to get perfect exposure on the foreground and refrain me from getting burnt out skies? Another thing, I heard some guy going on about multiple exposures then blending them. Now the PS work i can do but how do you expose for the sky then the foreground with out moving the camera from the frame? I have a canon eos300d.
The filter will help, as long as the difference in brightness between sky and ground isn't too much. In such a situation it'll be better than no filter anyway.
As to multiple exposures, do you have the facility to bracket on the 300D? If so, that'll do the trick - one exposure at the metered reading, one under and one over by whatever difference you choose, half a stop, one stop and so on.
Unless you've got a lot of movement in the scene you could well get away with hand holding if you're reasonably steady without any significant movement in the framing.
A further option is to shoot RAW, then convert the image twice with different exposure compensation settings - one for the sky and one for the ground. There will definitely be no priblem aligning two images made that way as they come from the same exposure.
KRs
Chris
The link Richard provided gives great, simple technical advice. Try not to overdo it though, if you lighten the foreground too much it can tend to look like you've just pasted a landscape onto a picture of a sky and that there's some other strange light source. Perhaps the guy who wrote it just exaggerated it to show the effect.
I just followed his layer mask technique and only lightened the foreground a fraction using Image>Adjust>Shadow/Highlight, you still get a lot more detail but it looks more natural CLICK You could probably go a bit lighter than I did, but not much.
There are Cokin ND grad in different strengths, you can then combine them for even higher strength if required, such as for sunsets.
Remember to shoot in manual mode and take the reading without the filter in the place and then add the filter keeping the exposure for the foreground.
Chris
Good advice by cokinman! As a christmas present I received some Hitech ND grads so I can tackle landscape photography. I tried the 0.6 (2 stop) grad whilst at work and compared the shot against one with no grad, and the difference is brilliant. The one without the grad is exposed well enough for the ground, but lost sky detail/saturation, but with the grad there is good balance and detail in both ground and sky.
I've not used the PS methods as yet, but my main aim is to get it right at the scene first. No doubt I'll have to learn the PS techniques at some point.
Trev
I find you have to be careful when using multiple ND Grads as this can sometimes result in purple fringing on the edges of the image under certain lighting conditions. This can then be a pig to remove in PS.
Anyone else had similar problems?
Roger
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the F stop,
you only need one ND filter the thicker the better ie,0.9,and the largest f stop,the larger the f stop,the smaller the hole,its that simple.
I use either Chris' (Maddock) RAW method or the Luminous Landscape ones to achieve the desired result.
There's always PS grad layers too 
If you're out with no tripod or filters, then expose for a brightish area of sky - you can always get back detail from the underexposed foreground but you can't rescue a blown out sky.
Kris.
If you bracket images, use a tripod and have photoshop the I have had some good results combining them using Fred Mirandas DRI add-in.
Chris
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