In this video I’m out on a super sunny day and I show you my quick process to get the exposure right without overthinking it. I start with the basics: I’m shooting 4K at 24fps, so I set my shutter speed to 1/50 (double the frame rate), and I keep my ISO as low as possible—on my Canon R10 that’s ISO 100. Then I choose my look with aperture. I like to stay wide open at f/2.8 on my Sigma 24-70 because it gives me that nice shallow depth of field and background blur. Of course, in bright sun those “cinematic” settings will blow out your image, so the real key is an ND filter. I recommend a variable ND because you can just rotate it and dial in the exposure until it looks correct, without changing your shutter or aperture. And then I share a little extra trick I just discovered: you can kind of “cheat” a polarizer look with a variable ND. Without changing the ND strength, you rotate the filter itself on the lens and you can reduce reflections on glass—like seeing through a car windshield way clearer—similar to what you’d use a CPL for.