A great many people have expounded on that you need to have a polarizer to achieve the best results in landscape photography. Few of those people show why you need a polarizer to get the most out of your landscape work.

The theory behind a polarizer is a fairly simply one, you stick one on the front of your lens and twist until you filter out as much reflecting light as possible. The reality of using a polarizer is much more interesting, especially if you have a lot of reflecting area in a scene. In the shot above I have my polarizer turned to filter out as much as possible in the scene. It lets me control what would otherwise be an extremely reflective surface (the water) with early AM sun. It adds depth and richness of color to the scene which I would lose from the reflected light.

Let’s look at what did happen when I took the polarizer off and let all that reflected light filter in for a moment:

As you can see, the water is very bright and reflective. In this case it is reflecting the pinks and purples of the morning sky back with a vengeance. However, this version of the scene offers its own charm, grace and beauty. Its a softer more subtle image, with lots of pastels to counterbalance the rich brown rock and blue-green of the waterfall (which, by the way, is blue-green in both shots because the angles of reflectance are such that the color is not changing). Certainly, different people will feel differently about which one is better, but the point of the exercise is to demonstrate the effect of a polarizer in a real world situation, not just some pictures of clouds behind a house.

Now I want you, the reader, to go take some before and after pictures with a polarizer. Remember, you don’t actually need some expensive equipment, you can test it out with some polarized sunglasses and your point and shoot!

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