Back to Basics, with Richard Spiers DPAGB BPE2*

Wed 23 Feb 2011 12:00am

Richard returns to the club to provide his entertaining reminder of what we should be thinking about when we press the shutter.

Comments

Sorry I missed Richard. He is always good value but we were sitting on a grandson. (Only way to keep him down.)

Great night Richard I must get some filters

Yes ... thanks Richard, thoroughly enjoyed your talk.

Richard talked a lot about the benefits of a circular polarising filter and I was quite taken by his results. Ok, I have a circular polarising filter and it fits on the lens and it turns around a bit (actually it turns around a lot, actually, it keeps on turning and turning and turning). I'll get to the point ... how does it work?

Forget whether it is linear or circular as long as it is the right one for your camera (the wrong one mucks up the metering). Look through the viewfinder while turning the filter and you should where the best effect is obtained. It will cut haze (a bit) ,intensify the blue in the sky (and sometimes the greens of foliage) and reduce reflections from glass and water (not so good on metal). It will have most effect if the camera is pointing at 90 degrees to the direction of the sunlight and if overdone can make skies look unnaturally dark blue and horrible.

I have a feeling that this a lesson in egg sucking for grannies but you did ask!

If you want a scientific explanation I can be REALLY boring.

Submitted by ian-newton on Sat 26 Feb 2011 9:12pm

If you want to bring it to the club on Wednesday I'll run through it with you.

You judge the effect by looking through the lens. It can cause a "problem" where the sky (say) is darker blue one side than the other. There are polariser effect filters in Photoshop and other better ways of doing it (in my opinion).

Once done in camera the effect is harder to get rid of than it is to create in Photoshop.

Can I join this session at the club I haven't a clue how it works

I've got it for my 105 macro lens. I tried taking pond skaters and after about 300 images and only about 0 that were any good I though this might help (see upload in my gallery: http://www.dumfriescameraclub.co.uk/gallery-images/ian-findlay/pond-skater). There were too many reflections and bright light bouncing from the sky and I though one of these might help. Obviously, I will need to play about with it but some tips would be good. I need to up the aperture to max for something this small so I'm going to need a brighter day and more light to keep the ISO down. It was quite a cloudy day when I tried before and the focus was too shallow.

Should I take my UV filter off before I put the CP filter on? Or does that have no effect? And thanks for pointing out that I lose a stop Rod.

No point in both filters and you risk vignetting. Could be more than a stop depending on the polariser