You may not want to stare at these pictures. I felt eyestrain just getting them ready to post! But I did a little experiment today with filters.
It's been years since I used filters on my camera because Photoshop and other programs take care of so many photography problems. I've had a set of graduated filters for a while and finally got an adapter to fit them on my camera. I took the first two pictures a few seconds apart but I turned the filter just to see what difference it made. It really changed the look of the sunbeams as it cut out some of the light.
That's not what it's for though. If you shoot with the dark section of the filter at the top, it will darken the sky a little bit. Since an automatic camera setting tries to average the light to a middle gray, blocking light from the sky allows the camera to let in more light on the lower section of the photo. Here we see a result, with the church showing up as white instead of just a shadowy wall or a silhouette.
I probably won't use the filters a lot. My cell phone does so much more than any of my cameras did back when I was studying photography, and it does most of it with no effort on my part. Digital photography has made it possible for everyone to get good shots.