by Frogwell » Thu Mar 31, 2011 10:44 am
Hi Alastair,
The circular polariser does tend to have that uneven blue sky effect in certain conditions or at certain angles, even with my 18-70mm lense. I've got to admit though, unless it's overly pronounced it doesn't bother me that much. The sky in your picture, while clearly varying in colour depth, is perfectly fine to me, but I suppose that's down to personal taste. You can of course minimise, or move, the variation by turning the filter to reduce the effect. Damn nice picture by the way!
I do tend to leave the polariser filter on even when it's not really doing much, but that's more laziness than anything. That said, even without blue sky I find it can have positive effects on landscapes as long as there is a decent amount of rich colour in the scene already. Not so good on landscape without much variation in colour though. It's particularly good on wet landscapes - after rain, or in the morning dew etc even without much direct sunshine.
As often as not I use the ND grad filter, even without a tripod. Admittedly the results are much better on a tripod, but for handheld stuff I generally just keep a couple of stops dialed in using the exposure compensation feature on the camera. This is of course at the expense of some depth of field, but as long as the light levels aren't really low I find I don't have to go to a really shallow focus. I might think different if I were trying to make a living out of it, but for my snaps it's an acceptable trade off.