For my birthday this year I got a circular polarizing filter for my camera, and a copy of Photoshop CS5 (one of the many benefits of being a student at a large university is ridiculously cheap software). I got my first chance to try out the filter today — I like it a lot, but it’s definitely going to take a bit of getting used to. It cuts down on a lot of the glare in an image (which is exactly what it’s designed to do), and it makes for picture-perfect blue skies, but I found in some cases that so much of the glare was cut that my image was left flat and lifeless. I also found that it increased the graininess of my photos a bit, which surprised me — but in hindsight, I think this isn’t too surprising, based on what it’s actually doing to the light waves. Anyways, enough rambling. Here are some photos!
1/125s, f/16, ISO-200, 28mm
In the above, you can really clearly see the effects that the polarizer had on the sky; look at the pretty blue glow! I had to bring out the color in the fields, though — the polarizer killed that part of the image a bit.
1/125s, f/11, ISO-200, 50mm
1/500s, f/7.1, ISO-200, 98mm
The last one is probably my favorite of the day — the filter really emphasized the color and light differences between different parts of the image, which I thought was really cool.
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