I’ve mentioned I own a polarizing lens.
Someone mentioned it was good for taking the glare out of water as well as giving the sky a funky colour and I want to try this, but here’s my question.
Are you ready for it?
My lens has a little white line which (I assume) is for me to aim at the sun to get best results. So what way do I point it when taking pictures of water? At the sun or at the water?
Colour me confused.
The polarizing lens lets through light at a specific polarity and totally blocks light at the perpendicular polarity, with a gradual (like a sinusoidal wave) change between the two.
The best real life example is polarising sunglasses, or driving glasses. When the sun is reflected off the ground, or water (rain on the ground), another car, etc, it is automatically polarised (iirc horizontally). your sunglasses has a vertical polariser and so the reflected light is blocked, but the unpolarized original light source is not blocked (well some of it is, but not all).
So in photography, if you want to get rid of reflections you use a polarizer. I believe the two white lines mark the horizontal of the lens, start there and rotate until most of the glare/reflection is removed.
Another thing it works really well on is photos through windows (from the outside).
Not sure it’ll do much for sky colour – the thing you really should get and keep it on your lens (even as a lens protector) is a UV filter. You’ll get rich blue skys with that instead of the faded blue tones. I never take my UV filter off.
Paul.
http://www.pgregg.com
Don’t aim at the sun – bad for the eyes – think Galileo.
Not sure about the white line – do you have a circular polarising filter, i.e one which you can rotate and see the sky change colour or the reflections appear/disappear in a lake? Or do you have one of those other ones?