Finally made it out this morning for sunrise – another of those hectic weeks where I didn’t get a camera in my hands for far too long and it left me feeling blah.  In a strange approximation to guilt, I got up even earlier this morning to atone, heading out to Ford’s before the sun was up.  It’s Fords because it’s close and because at least half the reason for going out was just to go out; but the other reason was to finally try out a new filter that I picked up a week back.

New to my bag is the Cokin P-series Blue/Yellow Polarizer.  It’s the (much!) cheaper version of the Sing-Ray Blue/Gold polarizer that you hear landscape photogs talking about a lot.  According to the reviews the Cokin isn’t as nice and suffers from softness, but frankly for $40 vs. $200+ for the competition, I’m okay with applying a bit of Unsharp Mask in post.

Blue/Yellow Polarizer in action

This is what you get when you play around with a blue/yellow polarizer; an option between a blue and yellow color shift as you rotate the filter.  It’s a great tool for accentuating colors in your landscape; punch up the golds during sunrise/sunset, punch up the blues during twilight.  You can also create some pretty funky looks without much effort (aka on accident):

Like this one, for example, where I got the polarizer somewhere between the two extremes, which resulted in a muted effect and a sky that looks, to me at least, like some funky overcast preceding an impending storm.  Yet at the same time, the shadows clearly show some direct sunlight, throwing long, hard shadows.  Strange.  A little creepy.  But I like it.

The trick to the blue/yellow polarizer is this; unlike a regular circular polarizer, where what-you-see-is-what-you-get, the blue/yellow gives you something entirely different.  Sure, when you’re shooting and have the viewfinder to your eye, you can see the effect of the polarizer in action, and you trip the shutter when you’ve got the effect you like.

That’s just not what the camera records.  Because of the way camera white balance works, the image you’ve created looks like this:

Unaltered blue/gold variants.

The shot on the left is polarized yellow, while the shot on the right is polarized blue.  Both look pretty much like crap, with strange purple shadows and oddly flat color shifts.  The trick to making these shots work is twofold: first, set a manual WB on camera when you shoot [if you leave it on Auto WB, it's going to try and correct for the polarizer color, which will A) defeat the entire point, and B) fail.]  The second bit comes into play in post, and this is one of those cases where if you shoot JPEG, you’re screwed.

When you import the RAW file into Adobe Camera Raw, press the I key to get the WB eyedropper tool, then click a neutral spot on the image; in the images above, I clicked the snow.  Bam!  The white balance shifts to correct itself and you’ve now got an image that looks like what you saw through the lens when shooting:

Corrected yellow polarization

Corrected blue polarization.

You can see now how using either the blue or yellow will pick up and amplify those colors in the scene.  You can also see how easy it is for the effect to come out looking overdone, as in the second corrected example, where the sky is a shade of blue rarely if ever seen on this planet.  This is definitely a neat filter to have in the bag, and I’ve seen photos where using a blue/yellow polarizer took an otherwise “nice” shot and kicked it up to the level of “amazing” shot.  But it’s a filter that needs to be used sparingly, with a light touch.

In my own use, at least until I feel more comfortable with it, I think that I’ll be making a regular exposure of any scene that I really like before slipping the blue/yellow on, just to be sure that I’ve got a fall-back in case the b/y goes overboard.

Here’s one last shot of that same tree, which I find myself shooting every time I’m up at Fords – this is still with the b/y, but with the effect dialed down somewhere between the two extremes.  The result is a sort of artificial twilight color.  I like it.  It was a fun morning to go out and play, and I feel like it helped bring the cabin fever back into check, at least a little.