A polarizing filter is an incredibly useful piece of kit that you can put over your
lens.
what it does is it saturates colour, it removes reflections and glare from things.
Now we've got this great row of beautiful beach huts against the blue sky
so i thought we'd get tom to talk us through how he would use the polarizing filter
in these circumstances.
Okay mike, first
a lot of people mistake and when to use a polarizer
Now if you have the sun to your back,
it's not going to have any affect at all.
If you're shooting into the sun
no effect at all.
So it has to come from the side.
ideally at a right angle to the subject.
But right now today we have the sun which has now come
out for us. We've been here for ages trying to wait for this.
So i want to show you the effect of it.
first i'll do a shot of these beach huts without
a polarizer okay.
Nice blue sky, it's a nice shot, but i'm going to improve it.
He's so clever.
Put this on and,
now when the polarizer you rotate
to see the effect.
You can watch it rolling around the edge can't you as you
twist it on the front. Okay, now i'm getting a nice bit of orientation there
Got a shot there.
Now look at that.
that's without
and that's with. You can see how what it's done is it's brought out the blue sky down
deeper.
it's also taken reflections off all the beach huts, so you're getting that really nice strong
saturated colour.
that really makes a beautiful shot, between the blue and the colourful beach huts.
Absolutely, okay it's something
as well which uh.. as you rotate this you can see
things happen, the stronger the sun is
the stronger the effect will be on the filter, so sometimes
it could be a little bit over the top, so you need to be a bit careful, because
if you turn the filter you can see it happening, it's a case of
thinking about how you use it as well. That's right. The other thing mike is if you're shooting it high altitudes, say if you're on a skiing holiday or something
like that
and you're using a polarizer
you're gonna get too much of an affect, it's actually going to make your skies go
black. that has happened
a lot of times.
So, sometimes you want to dial the polarizer back a little bit or don't use a polarizer at all.
So you have to be very cautious about that.
Oh right, I've got you, do you know why or is it just like happens?
it just happens. It happens guys, don't worry about it.
don't worry about it
Okay, another instance where you have no light, it's raining for instants
you're photographing a garden,
and it's covered all over with plants and everything and with some nice glistening water
but you want to remove the reflections
but what you're seeing is just the strong saturated colour,
so you uses a polarizer in that instance.
I once used a polarizing filter to remove a set of road works, doesn't work, does.
how?
right i was photographing a Hurst for a firm of undertakers
We'd got the Hurst out on the street it's nice and sunny, the suns coming in from the side
the guys at the front with his big hat on and all the rest of it
there's a shop,
opposite side of the road there's road works and all this
kind of stuff, yeah, so all this stuffs reflecting in the side of the hurst.
well you don't want a shiny Hurst with the reflection of roadworks in it,
So,
polarizing filter popped in on the front of the lens,
rotated around steadily
it took the reflection of the side, job done, much much quicker than fiddling
around in Photoshop with what could have been over a days work trying to
piece by piece remove it, the other thing with a polarizer you have
to watch is a polarizer is very dark and it will remove a couple of stops of light
So really you've got to use it on a tripod,
So don't think that bunging in a polarizer filter on the front will make your pictures look
amazingly more colorful and vibrant
it may not necessarily do that unless you have the correct light.
What it may well do is give you fussy pictures because it is cutting away light so it's
shutter speed will be slower.
This is why you need a tripod.
It's a case of using it appropriately.
Polarizing filter very very versatile, very very useful
and makes big difference in all kinds of photography. You can use it for product, landscapes you can use it for
architecture, you can use it for all kinds of things.
This is the Lee system, sits on the front you;ve got a holder here,
and the beauty of this mike is that it sits on the outside of the holder
so if you do want to use any
other filters in the camera
you can slot other filters in behind if you need to, but we're
just going to look at filters one at a time here.
So polarizing filter, that's what it does, it can make a big difference.