Photo Gear

One Tip For Shooting Without a Polarizing Filter

Photographers often head out on the road with a lot of gear, but that doesn’t mean they never want to travel light. But that can mean leaving something important behind. Then it’s time to jerry-rig.

Imagine the situation where you’ve headed out on a short trip and you didn’t want to take your DSLR and a ton of gear with you. You just stuck your compact in your jacket or your backpack’s side pocket at the last minute.

Suddenly, you realize that you miss your polarizing filter badly. But you just happen to be wearing polarizing lenses on your face—and they do a similar job. So just lay the glasses right across the lens (with a compact there’s no risk that the rims will appear in the picture or that the glasses will be too small) and press the trigger.

Seriously—just compare these two pictures:

Picture without polarizing glasses
Picture without polarizing glasses
Picture taken with the help of polarizing glasses—notice how the clouds stand out, the fog in the distance is suppressed, and the reflections in the water are muted slightly.
Picture taken with the help of polarizing glasses—notice how the clouds stand out, the fog in the distance is suppressed, and the reflections in the water are muted slightly.

This solution is of course useless for the larger lenses found on DSLRs, where a blurred image of the glasses would be visible in the resulting pictures. But when it comes to improving photos from your compact, in a pinch, a pair of polarizing glasses just might come in handy.