New to polarising filters

[theshortstack]

Morning all,

Having just purchased my first polarising filter, I was wondering whether anyone could point me in the right direction of a good tutorial to help me get the most out of it.

I guess the areas I'm most interested are how far the polariser should be turned when taking a picture and how that affects shutter speeds at all.

Any help would be really welcome.

Cheers,

[donoreo]

To answer "how far" that depends on how you want the photo to look. Look through the viewfinder while turning, when it looks how you want it, stop

You will loose around 2 stops of light, so the shutter speed will be slower.

[LouiseTopp]

How do you put filters onto the lens. Do you push them on, or screw them on?

Just asking as I am going to get a UV filter.

Thanks.

[StephenBatey]

Probably screw in. Some cameras use(d) ones that clipped on, but you are extremely unlikely to have one. If you look at the front of the lens, it should give you the (screw in) filter size. If I could post a photo to illustrate, I would.

[LouiseTopp]

It's an 18-55 I think

[Jediboy]

If you look under the lens it should have a number and a circle with a line through it, maybe 52 or somewhere near that. That will be your filter size, and yes, screw in.

[nick_gray]

Louise, the 18-55mm is the focal range of your lens and not the filter thread size. I've just had a look at my old Canon 18-55 lens and it's a 58mm diameter thread.

Regards

Nick

[Jediboy]

If you look on the inside of your lens cap, the filter size should be there too.

[nick_gray]

I was going to upload an image of my old lens, showing the lens thread diameter, but I found that the image upload on this forum is just as bad as it's always been, difficult to find where to do it, logging you out as you try and find your way around and then failing to upload with no useful error message, so I've given up.

As for the original poster looking for a tutorial on using a polarising filter, it depends on what you want to use it for, landscapes, bright sunshine, water shots. You might be better off searching this site for 'polarising filters', where you'll find some specific articles. - http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/?s=polarising+filter

HTH

Nick

[nick_gray]

I thought I'd try an image link from Flickr, as I'm not able to upload to DCW:



As Jediboy says above, you should see a circle with a line through it, as I have pointed to in this image. Unfortunately different lenses have bigger or smaller diameters, and therefore different thread sizes, so you may need filter(s) for each of your lenses, for example my walk-about lens is an 18-200mm which has a 72mm thread and my 100mm macro has a 67mm thread.

Regards

Nick