POTW: Polarizers

Ever since I had my Canon A80 and heard you could add an extension tube to put filters on it I've wanted to get a polarizing filter. In fact, it was a selling point that I could add filters to it. Unfortunately It was never a huge priority and so I never did get any filters or even the extension tube needed for them. Now, after owning a dSLR for over a year (invoice date was March 13th of last year), I finally have a polarizing filter.

I first did some test shots around the house trying to remove reflections off windows and stuff and noticed things are quite as obvious as I thought. At any rate I was at my parent's house mowing the lawn and I brought my camera with me. It was a gorgeous bright day out and figured it would be perfect for testing out the filter. In these shots the sun was camera left as you can tell by the shadows on the trees. I shot the above picture and immediately removed the polarizer and took the picture below (I never removed the UV filter I have on the lens)

A couple things are immediately obvious. First the grass looks really bad compared to the polarized one--I removed all the reflections from the grass. Also the sky in upper right is a much darker shade of blue than the left side. I didn't know this at the time but later on found this nice page explaining how polarizing filters work and--more importantly--how to use them. Apparently for the sky I was exactly at the right angle as I should have been 90° from the sun instead of more like 60°. Also since I used a wider focal length that makes the color shift more noticeable. Personally I like the graduation like that, although I would have preferred the whole sky to look like how it does on the right. If I spent more time with trial and error I may have come up with something better but these two images give a good comparison I think.

I went to an abandoned place last week as well. I was feeling pretty tired and didn't feel that well from seasonal allergies, so I plan on going there again at some point. That or I'll use what I have as a stand-in in case I skip a week.

In related news, I had a slight panic attack a couple days ago. I am in the process of joining a couple model sites in hopes I can do some more model photography. While browsing through the images in DPP I noticed several of the images from the photo shoots I did at anime punch were partially corrupted. It was odd because I didn't notice it while first editing the pictures and it only really affected the thumbnails. The full image seemed to be fine. After posts to several forums it finally clicked that I have the past 15 or so days of off-site backups stored through jungledisk. I went into there hoping I imported them and held off a day before starting to post process them. Sure enough I was able to recover the untouched files and replace the corrupt files with them. Not sure what caused it. The files are stored on a drobo which should handle any read/write errors. All I can think of is I "saved" the files by closing DPP and it prompting me to save the images. I've done that before when I've edited a lot more files and never had any issues, which was odd. Only other thing is the file got corrupted when it was being written to the drobo. I'm just glad I had those backups. Unfortunately since I've bought jungledisk for a one time price they have now gone to a subscription only based model, which disapoints me. At least I got grandfathered in to the non-subscription version.