Why you want a Polarizer Filter

I recently bought a 50mm lens with a circular polarizer. I though I’d share some quick examples to show what a polarizer filter does for your photo’s.

The polarization effect is probably one of the few (if not only) effect which you can not reproduce in photoshop or any other image processing program. Most applications try by increasing saturation, which is nowhere near the effect of a real polarizer.

By rotating the filter, you have the luxury of choosing how much effect you want to have, anywhere between 0% and 100%. The shots below give you an idea what the range of the effect is:

Shooting 16:9 with a 4:3 Camera

If you have a Canon Ixus 80IS, like me, and you shoot video for your widescreen television at home (like me), you may want to try out this little trick.

The Canon Ixus is a 4:3 camera. The video that comes out of it is almost square shaped. When you try to make a 16:9 video, you can stretch it, or crop it. Cropping is far better, but you need some “headroom” to do that. If you made a closeup, chances are that you do not have enough room to crop to a 16:9 format.

I solved this by making this little chart, which I placed on a memorycard and put in my camera. By previewing the image on the camera’s display, you know where the “16:9 limit” is. I put two pieces of half-translucent tape on the camera, so I can tell what fit’s inside the 16:9 frame. I also included the other formats, like 3:2, and 2.39:1, should you want to make wide-screen theater movies

Then, I load up the movie in iMovie, and it will be cropped perfectly. Suppose you missed the 16:9 frame or want to re-center your shot, you can always press the “crop” button in your project to tell iMovie which piece of the image you want.

New York online…

We have returned from our trip to New York. Actually, we’ve been staying in Weehawken, New Jersey to visit Manhattan. Today I maxed out my upload limit for this month to put the pictures online. You can see them at my 32hq account (because Flickr hurts my eyes).

Enjoy the pictures. When the monthly upload limit expires I’ll upload some more, so maybe it’s wise to subscribe to my photo feed.

1 week Gran Canaria

Last week in Gran Canaria, I…

• Shot 158 photo’s, some of which available here