Blended Photos vs ND gradients

monkeybrain wrote:

I can hand hold my ND grad while shooting (no tripod). Difficult to do exposure bracketing without a tripod in my experience. To be honest, I also don't want the hassle of blending photos in photoshop or gimp or whatever - much quicker and more straightforward to just adjust highlights/shadows etc in lightroom like I do with all my shots.

If you're in bright light it's easy enough to bracket for the use case of preventing blown out skies.  You can use Hugin to automatically line up the images if you want to and because they were all still fairly short shutter speed you can even line them up very easily by hand.  In other conditions and/or for other desired outcomes bracketing may be more of an issue.

I think it depends quite a bit on your intended outcome.  Bracketed shots offer much more flexibility than the highlights/shadows stuff in Lightroom.  It's akin to the difference in dynamic range between true HDR and using some HDR-like processing from a single raw file.  That is, Lightroom sliders vs. blending.

For ND vs. blending, again, I think it depends.  For instance, maybe you don't have a very even horizon, so then the ND filter can't really be hitting just the sky (unless you want to let parts of the sky not be covered).  So, say there's a mountain, well, we don't really want to bring the mountain down a few stops along with the sky do we?  We also don't want to have the sky on either side of the mountain overexposed.  Of course if you have a nice even horizon it makes the ND filter and easy choice that doesn't really sacrifice anything.