Circular Polarizing Filter
The circular polarizing filter I use is a 37mm threaded HOYA. It
cost me an arm and a leg, but it does deliver the goods. I´d never
used one before and all I can say is its effect on the sky is stunning
 and on water
surprising! My Gallery contains many scenes with lovely blue sky;
that´s thanks to this filter. There is also one shot of weed/algae
in a stream. The fact you can see that stuff is down to this filter.
It also has the effect of deepening the colour of foliage and enhancing
its contrast.
I have been asked about how I manage to see/judge the effect of the
polarizer when the camera LCD is so very difficult to use in bright sunlight. The technique I use is a combination of guesswork and a
continual rotation of the filter until I see an "improvement" in the dim, fuzzy stuff in the LCD. I also try to shade the LCD with my body/baseball
cap/nearby wall to improve things. To be safe I'd normally take a few shots of the same scene with slightly differing filter angles. It's actually a lot easier than it sounds :-)
It's also a good way of meeting new people, too - one guy saw me standing in one spot for such a long time peering at this little screen that he joined me to watch what he though was a TV! There´s only one catch:
vignetting. This filter is quite deep in size (about 8 or 9 mm) and when mounted on the camera using the 28-37mm adapter, a small bit of the edge of it is just visible when the camera zoom
is set at its widest. This is evident in some of the (particularly) landscape format images where a dark shadow can be seen in the top left hand corner of the frame. Have a look in the Gallery. |
