Don’t forget to pack: your polarising filter

How to get the best from your Koh Samui photography? If you’ve ever wondered how professional photographers get the sky to look so blue and the puffy white clouds to pop, a polarising filter is a crucial tool to enable you to do both, and more. See the results for yourself:

What does it do? You may have heard of polarising sunglasses. A polarised lens helps to cut down reflections, glare, and generally makes scenery more vibrant. They’re especially useful on the water, as you can now peer into the shallows no matter how bright the sun is. Our polarising filter is a crucial part of our “bag of secret tricks” for taking better vacation pictures.

A polarising filter uses exactly the same principle – but for your camera. Find the right filter for your camera at Amazon.

How do I use it? There are a few rules of thumb when it comes to using polarising filters.

• They work best when the sun is directly to your left or right when you’re composing the shot. For this reason, they’re best used in the morning or late afternoon when the sun is lower in the sky.
• Most photographers agree that midday is a bane to taking good photos, and polarising filters are no exception. When the sun is directly overhead, the polarisation will be minimal. Just wait a couple hours, and try again.
• The most common type is a circular polarising filter. Depending on the orientation of the filter, you may find that you have to rotate it as much as 90° to see the effect. Take care, because this means that if you swing the camera from landscape to portrait, you’ll have to give the filter a quarter turn for it to work.

How to choose a filter?

1. First, make sure your camera can take a filter. If you have an SLR, this is an unqualified yes.
2. On the front of the lens, you’ll find a few narrow screw threads – simple screw the filter on the front and away you go.
3. Make sure you buy the right diameter filter for your lens though! 52mm and 58mm are common sizes, but lenses can be as wide as 72mm or as narrow as 40mm.

Polarising alternatives for point-and-shoots? There may still be hope. Certain ‘prosumer’ cameras, larger than a point and shoot, but smaller than an SLR, have a hidden thread to accept an adapter, which will then take a filter. Even if you’ve got a small point-and-shoot you can just slip in a shirt pocket, you’re not excluded from the world of polarisation – you may just need to take a more DIY approach. You can simply hold the filter in front of the lens, or even use a pair of polarising sunglasses. We took the photo above by holding sunglasses in front of the lens – not ideal maybe, but fun to experiment with.

Whether you want to take to the water with your camera (during some Samui watersports), or snap happily from somewhere as gorgeous as Choeng Mon Beach – a polarising filter could be your favourite holiday toy. Add it to your Thailand packing list, and choose the right size for your camera at Amazon.

P.S. Coming in April? See what equipment we recommend to safeguard electronics during Samui’s Songkran.

(Filter photo c/o somegeekintn via Flickr Creative Commons).