The Wonder of a Polarizing Filter

As I was rapidly flipping through images on the back of my X-T5 before downloading the trip photographs onto my computer, the change between two of the images - essentially the same photograph, but different - jumped out at me.  It only took me a couple of flips back and forth to remember what had happened between the two shots, enough for me to decide I could write a blog post about it.

A polarizing filter is one of the most valuable tools a landscape photographer has.  It ranks right up there with a tripod.  It’s a filter that can rotate (spin) within the filter frame to adjust its effects.  It polarizes incoming light and acts much like polarized sunglasses.  In short, it can help reduce and, in some cases eliminate, glare off non-metallic surfaces.  Think the sheen on wet leaves, or the glare from water like a creek or lake.  By doing so, it often increases somewhat the apparent color saturation of the object the glare is affecting.  It also, in some cases, but not all, will help darken blue skies.

Without going into too much detail, normal scattered light is oriented in all directions - think the numbers on a clock.  A polarizing filter allows only light in one orientation (3/9, 12/6 for example) to pass through the filter to hit the sensor (film).  All other light is blocked.  Rotate the polarizing filter, and different qualities of light (for example those oriented at 4/10 on a clock) will hit the sensor.

So while we were at our pull-out viewpoint at Uig Bay, I was making images looking to the west.  Usually, with broader landscape images I rotate the polarizing filter to darken blue sky to help provide color separation with white clouds, as you can see below.

But as I was evaluating where on the rotation of the dial the blue sky effect was greatest I wondered what would happen if I rotated the polarizing filter 90 degrees from that setting to obtain the most extremely different effect possible?  So I made the above image, rotated the filter 90 degrees and made the image below.  These two images were exposed three seconds apart (thank you Lightroom metadata).

On the back of the camera, one came across as a well-defined photograph, whereas the second appeared as a bluish-silvery abstract image (you can see the pronounced change in the clear sky (blue versus near-white) running horizontally above the distinct cloud).  The effect changes as the images get larger on a screen, but I could develop the image to recreate that effect from the smaller LCD screen if I wanted to.

I was actually quite surprised how pronounced the change was in the parts of the image that was not blue sky.  The lesson learned - always rotate the polarizing filter after you’ve made the image you think you want to make, you might be surprised at the resulting effects and want to take that photograph too.

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