Hoya Circular Polarizing Lens Filter

Here is my PayPal receipt of payment and shipping info. It arrived after my trip to Killarney but before my second trip into the interior of Algonquin last weekend. I got to use it and it does what it was built to do -- polarizing light rays. I like it.

The filter has two rings. The inner screws into the Hoya ND filter I have. The outer ring is free to rotate. Have two filters on the lens may be too much (losing an f-stop ??) but it was troublesome having to swap them.

10.2 megapixels

Who says extra pixels don't matter? With a good lens, one can crop and get a fairly good size of a subject. This red throat black bird was shot a good 20 metres away with my Nikkor 18-200mm lens at 200mm. The original picture has too much background distraction so I cropped it. Granted that it could be a lot sharper -- and it can be achieved with a really fast lens.


A little bugger on a leaf shot a few feet away. After cropping, it needed a little sharpening.


A first shot with my new Hoya CPL filter. Well, it was not useful in this shot though. :) There was no harsh reflection. Again, this is cropped and the contrast adjusted.

One thing I found interesting is the bokeh. Some of the background is clearly circular-shaped, as if the shot was taken with a catadiopteric lens. I wonder if that was the effect of the CPL filter.

Polarizing Filter, part 2

After 10 business days, I finally received my package in the mail. The filter came in in immaculate, brand new condition so I am happy. I took some shots but clouds are hovering over our heads over the last few days. The real test will come in a couple of weeks in the interior of Algonquin. I remember I needed a polarizer a couple of months ago on my first trip. This second trip will see more pictures of the wild with a polarizer!

Polarizing Filter

A friend lent me his Cokin polarizer for almost 9 months. I finally returned it a month ago. I liked the effect it produced so I searched around for a circular polarizer (CPL). There are many out there. On eBay you can find super cheap CPLs but as I have said before, you are likely going to get what you pay for. I decided not to buy the $10 filters from Hong Kong. I will just be disappointed down the road with cheap equipments. So, I ordered a Hoya circular polarizing filter, the Standard model, not the best of their line. It should be good enough.

The package should arrive in about a week or so. Summer has not ended yet so this filter will be great for landscape shots. I will post sample shots once the filter arrives. Can't wait.

Panorama, part 3

Here is I think a better photo. I used Windows Vista's built-in image viewer. It has a cool tool to crop the image. This image sits in the background of my black desktop. It looks really cool I think.

Panorama, part 2

After stripping away the colours, I thought the photo looked more dramatic. A storm was brewing....

Panorama

Here is a software I like using to stich photos to form a panoramic view of a scene. It is called Hugin. Fairly easy to use but slow to stich 6 photos together on my 1.6GHz notebook. It took at least 20 minutes to generate the following panorama of George Lake in Killarney Provincial Park.

The photo was taken this past Sunday. We were hoping for a sunset but clouds moved in. I took a few shots. I liked the chaos of the sky.