If your skies aren’t as blue as they could be, or your pictures of water looked washed out, you may need to learn a little about polarizing filters.
Again this is a good time to break out that manual on your camera. Many point and shoot cameras have a coating on the lens that automatically polarizes everything in your photos. However if your camera does not have this coating, you may need to purchase filters for the camera that will polarize light as it comes in through the lens. If you are using a 35mm SLR camera and you didn’t buy it as a package that cames with filters, you will need to purchase one of these filters.
Filters look like very thin lenses and screw onto the lens itself. There are two kinds of polarizing filters: a fixed polarizing and a circular polarizing filter. I recommend the circular polarizing filter, because it rotates and allows you to polarize different areas of the image. This comes in handy when shooting pictures of water, because the polarizing filter also knocks a lot of the glare off of reflective surfaces like water and glass. If you have auto focusing lenses on your camera, you may need to use a specific polarizing filter. So if you don’t have your camera’s manual, you might want to take it down to the camera store and see what kind of polarizing filter they recommend for your specific camera.
While you are purchasing filters for your lenses, you may want to pick up an inexpensive Ultra Violet filter as well. This filter helps remove haze from skies and landscapes, and can be used along with your polarizing filter. I also recommend that you purchase one of each of these filters for every lens you have for the camera if you have multiple lenses. The lenses may be different sizes where the filter screws onto it so you may have to do this anyway. It also saves you from having to add and remove filters every time you change lenses. The filters serve another purpose for helping protect your expensive camera lens.
Once you have the filters on your lenses, try a little experiment. This only works with cameras that allow you to focus through the lens instead of through a separate view finder. Take your camera outside and look at the horizon through it. If you are using a circular polarizing filter, turn the filter as you are looking through the lens. You should see the sky changing color. Polarizing filters only work at certain angles from the sun though, around a 45 degree angle. The closer you get to the sun or directly opposite of the sun, the less the polarizing filter will work. So if you aren’t seeing the change in sky color, try rotating your position to the sun.
As I mentioned before, polarizing filters also allow you to take the glare off of reflective surfaces. This helps you get better color in water scenes and can help a lot in reducing reflections off of glass or any reflective surface. You will find this filter very handy in situations like taking pictures of animals at zoos where you often have to take photographs through a glass viewing pane, or even when taking pictures of mountain streams, lakes, rivers cars and even the ocean.
The color difference is sometimes subtle and sometimes startling. As you get used to using a polarizing filter, you will begin to automatically check to see if the image looks better with just a turn of the filter. The polarizing filter and UV filter are both essential tools to add to your camera bag.
