Searching for Autumn Color - Page 2

As a follow-up to my little excursion last Wednesday, which I commented on in the prior blog post, I decided that I would take last Friday (a week ago today) and explore a bit of southern New Hampshire. My goal was to drive "the long way" to Jaffrey, New Hampshire and the Mt.  Monadnock area.

For the first time in five or six years I brought along (and used) a polarizing filter. I was expecting a bright  blue sky and puffy clouds, and thought the polarizer would give me some really nice results. 

Even though I am happy with how the sky and clouds turned out in the images, I'm not completely convinced that a polarizer is worth the hassle.  That's because with software like Photoshop and Lightroom, it is fairly easy to approximate a polarized look by adjusting saturation and luminescence sliders. The results are not quite as nice as what a polarizer can do, but it takes no fumbling with additional equipment in the field. And some would even argue that adding a filter on top of a lens downgrades image quality by adding more glass layers through which light must travel. I can certainly say that it creates two more glass surfaces that must be kept clean!

A hassle (for me) is that the sun must come from a specific angle for the polarizer to have full impact. In addition, for each shot, I need to remove the lens hood to be able to rotate the polarizer to its proper placement for that specific composition.  Following that, the hood must be replaced, while at the same time hoping that the action of twisting the hood onto the lens does not also rotate the polarizer.

All that being said, I do plan to experiment more with polarizers. Not only when the sky is blue, but also for close-ups of flowers and foliage, where in many situations the polarizer can reduce glare and make colors richer.

A few from my fall excursion to Jaffrey:

In the center and in the distance is Mt. Monadnock.

The perspective of the 24mm-e lens used here makes it look

smaller and further away than it actually is.