Recently our family took a trip to Shore Lodge. What a great place to take pictures! I didn't get out to any special sites, but there were plenty of beautiful pictures right outside the lodge.I got a chance to use my new polarizer, and was very much impressed with effect. Basically it acts like sunglasses for your camera. It creates deeper blues in the sky and increases saturation and contrast, as well as removing glare and unwanted reflection. Since I don't have a dual-grad filter*, but I played around and discovered that a polarizer filter can be used similar effect. I have a circular polarizer, which when rotated on the lens, can produce a brighter sky or darker sky. In order to get the sky and land at similar exposures I rotated the filter until the sky was slightly darker and then snapped the photo.
One of the things I tried to incorporate into my photos in this trip particularly was using a foreground. If I had just taken a photo of the mountains and the lake, tightly zoomed in, it would have looked pretty boring. But by including different objects like the light and docks int the foreground the picture is visually pleasing with multiple layers vs just the lake and mountains, which would be relatively flat by comparison.
*A dual-grad filter like a polarizer fits on the end of a lens, but half the filter being clear and the other half slightly tinted. The tinted half is used to block some of the light from the sky so that both the sky and the ground are both properly exposed. With out it, sunset pictures tend to have the sky exposed right, but the ground is usually dark and underexposed.
