Filters can be a great way to improve photographs. They can change the colors of the entire scene or landscape, improve the look of the subjects, or they can be helpful and reduce glare and reflection while also enhancing other elements of the scene. This is the way that a polarizing filter operates and many landscape photographers rely on them to give some remarkably good results.
It helps to understand that polarization is the way light behaves, and where photography and polarization are concerned the filter simply forces the light to behave a bit better for the camera. It does this by reducing glare and reflection, enhancing the tones of colors falling under bright light, reduces the reflection of water droplets in the atmosphere (improving photographs of the clear sky), and can even deepen some contrasts.
How can this be used effectively in photography? Let’s take a simple example of a common landscape scene – a gently bubbling brook. For our example we will have the brook rolling across the corner of a brilliant green field. Now, the naked eye will see certain things like the lovely rocks and stones beneath the moving water, and the billions of blades of grass with the dew still lying heavily upon them. The camera, however, would see light reflecting everywhere and make certain adjustments because of this light. The final result would not be the lovely scene recorded by the human eye, resulting in the stones beneath the water disappearing behind the reflection of the light from overhead and the grass only looking extra shiny.
Simply using a polarizing filter over the camera’s lens would allow the photographer to reduce the glare to such a degree that many of the finer details would return to the final photograph.
The trick to using these filters is in knowing the best way to orient them on the camera itself. First of all any polarizing lens is going to absorb light before it enters the sensor. This means that the camera’s automatic settings are going to drop to accommodate the lack of light. So, the shutter speed set at 1/250th of a second will suddenly drop to somewhere around 1/60th of a second. This means that almost all photographs taken with polarizing filters will have to be done from a tripod.
The next thing to understand is where the polarizing will occur, and the position of the sun in the sky is the best way to determine this. Most photographers aim to have the filter at ninety degrees to the sun’s position, but they also use their naked eye while positioning the filter. When they look through their viewfinder an see reflections disappearing or contrast sharpening they know they have it just right.
san jose portrait photographers
Benipayo Photography
San Jose | Portrait | Photographer | Children
Contact: Michael at michael@benipayo.com
408-717-3670 — 415-763-7643
Amy Renfrey is the author of two major successful ebooks ?Digital Photography Success? and ?Advanced Digital Photography?. She is a photographer and also teaches digital photography. Her educational ebooks takes the most complex photography terms and turns them into easy to understand language so that anyone, at any level of photography, can easily move to a semi-professional level of skill in just a very short time. She?s photographed many things from famous musicians (Drummers for Prince and Anastasia) to weddings and portraits of babies. Amy also teaches photography online to her students which can be found athttp://www.DigitalPhotographySuccess.com
by BENIPAYO
Write somethin'! Got somethin' to say?