“Capturing Alaska”

with Wayde Carroll






Polarizing Filters



A wonderful tool to carry in your camera bag is the polarizing filter. This small (though not inexpensive) addition to your gear can have dramatic effects on your image making. A polarizer basically eliminates light waves that travel parallel to your lens barrel helping to saturate colors, reduce glare and reflections, and add some punch to partly cloudy skies.
These filters come as lens- mounted screw-ons that rotate in front of the lens or as rectangular filters for filter holders such as the Cokin P series. There are also two types. You can buy circular or linear polarizers. If you have a camera with through-the-lens metering, which most SLR’s are now, or split screen focusing, you need to use the circular type or else you’ll have trouble getting proper exposures and focus. If you’re not sure, it’s always safe to get the circular type.
The advantage of the rectangular filters is that you only need one filter for all of your lenses ( as long as you have a filter adapter for each lens as well). With the screw-mount filters you need to have one for each varying lens mount diameter you own, 52mm, 77mm, 62mm etc.
I prefer the screw mount type because I can still use my lens hood, which in many cases is critical in keeping stray light off the front of the lens.
Using the filter is easy. Once it’s mounted, you just rotate it until you achieve the desired effect. There are a couple of things to know that will help you out; A polarizer is most effective when it’s at a 90 degree angle to the sun, meaning the sun is to your left or right, and is also more effective when the sun is low ie: near sunrise and sunset. This isn’t to say it can’t be useful during mid-day. The polarizer can really make a partly cloudy sky dramatic any time of day. Also, once you start using wide angle lenses over 28mm you really start to notice a banding in the sky, a dramatic darkening and lightening that can ruin an image. It looks very unnatural. So keep an eye out! Another thing to keep in mind is that a polarizer darkens your exposure so your going to lose 1 1/2 to 2 stops of light. This means your tripod will be a necessity in lower light!
As with every technique it’s important not to over use it. A polarizer can give a distinct look to an image and can be seen as too gimmicky if used too often or to the extreme. One thing I like to do is rotate the filter until I’ve achieved maximum effect and then rotate back a bit until the effect is somewhere in between full and none. This helps make the look a little more natural. Once you experiment a bit you’ll start seeing situations where it might be effective.
In the first image I’ve posted the polarizer helped eliminate some of the glare from the dead tree and saturated the fall colors. You can see some of the banding in the sky I was talking about but it wasn’t enough to bother me here.
This second image was taken with no polarization while the third image has the full effect of the polarizer. Notice the saturated colors and the lack of glare on the foliage and stream in the polarized image. The extra time required because of the two stops loss of light also helped get the nice blur in the moving water.
Similarly, Image 4 has no polarization while Image 5 is fully polarized. I also included Image 6, which shows the scene partially polarized and a more natural look that still has benefits from the filter!
Experiment and have some fun!