4 Tips for Using a Polarizing Filter to Shoot the Perfect Sky

Using a polarizing filter in your landscape photography is a great way to darken skies and create images with real impact. These 4 tips for using a polarizing filter will help get you started right.

Polarizing filters have a number of uses, but one of the most basic is to darken blue skies. This can help to enhance the contrast between sky and cloud, making it ideal for landscape or architecture shots.

Using a polarizing filter is also perfect for removing reflections and glare from non-metallic surfaces. This enables you to improve the color and definition in your waterfall, sea and river photos, but it’s also effective for darkening windows in buildings and helping to remove unwanted reflections on still-life subjects.

Using a polarizing filter also reduces the amount of light reaching your camera’s sensor by around two stops, which can either be a benefit or a hindrance, depending on what you’re shooting and the effect you’re trying to achieve.

On the plus side it will allow you to use wide apertures for shallow depth of field effects, or longer shutter speeds for creative blur, in bright conditions. But this reduced light can make it difficult to get sharp results, especially in low light, without using either a tripod or increasing the ISO to compensate.

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