Polarizers and Graduated Filters
June 5, 2010
Filters make a big difference, especially for bright outdoor photographs that include a lot of sky. Lots of people think that photoshop is all they need to control their images but there is a lot you can do, even in the age of digital, before the light hits your camera’s sensor.
The polarizing filter is one if the first accessories any landscape photographer should have, or even photographers who like to include the sky in their photographs. The polarizer lets you control the tones of your sky and gets you much richer pictures. They can be tweaked as well. Polarizers cut out reflected light that comes in to the camera at a certain angle. The optimum angle is 90 degrees from the sun.
You can play with your polarizer and see the difference in the sky when the arrow on the rim is pointed towards the sun, and 90 degrees from it. Keep in mind that the sky is a dome, not flat. Your polarizer’s effect will change over your photograph if you’re shooting at a wide angle. You can see it in the above photographs, comparing the top of the frame to the bottom.
I purchased a Hoya 58mm circular polarizing filter for about $63 from The Camera Store. It has to be circular or else your auto-focus won’t work. I chose 58mm because most of Canon’s half-decent, non-L lenses use this size of thread. I purchased an adapter to step up the filter size from my 50mm 1.8 II so I could use the same filter on it. You can spend the big bucks and get a mult-coated Singh-Ray polarizer but if you’re on a budget like myself, the Hoyas are fairly well reviewed and getting those colour/contrast improvements now is far more valuable than spending $250+ for possibility of some added sharpness.
I pack an ND (neutral density) graduated filter with me whenever I expect to be photographing out-doors. These babies let you do HDR right in your camera! They are sheets of plastic, or glass, that gradate from clear to dark. You use them to darken the sky, keeping it from over-exposing, thus allowing you to properly balance the exposure of the ground with the sky. This is a very difficult task that would require either a sacrifice of either, or two exposures to be composited in photoshop.
I shoot with a cheap Cokin 3 stop ND graduated filter. If I’m shooting at 50mm or so, I use a holder that attaches to the lens’s threads. If I’m shooting wider I hold it in front of the lens with my hand, otherwise the lens-mounted holder causes vignetting at the corners. It cost me about $43 canadian from The Camera Store and was worth every penny. Highly recommended.
Comments (0) | More: My Process, Photography, Rural Alberta
Leave a Reply
Categories
Recent Posts
Archives
Also view my…
