The question is simple: would there ever be a reason to use a polarizer with three-point lighting? I understand that a polarizer blocks glares coming from one direction, thereby increasing color depth and decreasing glares. Because three-point lighting has light coming from three different directions, would using a polarizer be totally pointless or could it increase image quality by reducing glares from say, your key light?
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polarizer with three-point lighting?
- Thread starter WhiteOpus
- Start date
I can't see how it would be of much help, especially if you're using any sort of diffusion on your light sources as you're going to end up with light coming from all different angles. Part of the reason it works so well with sunlight is the fact that the sun is so far from us that the rays hitting the earth are essentially parallel. Maybe with a tightly focused spotlight you'd get a little effect, but it'll probably be minimal.
The limited use I could think of is if you wanted a bright light source in a scene of highly reflective surfaces you could possibly polarize the light itself, and then filter the reflections with an on-camera polarizer - but that's a complex setup and not something I've ever heard of actually being used.
Plus it's going to reduce your overall exposure by a couple of stops, which means you're going to need brighter lights just to get the correct exposure, or a faster lens or higher ISO to compensate. For most general shooting situations I can't see it being beneficial.
The limited use I could think of is if you wanted a bright light source in a scene of highly reflective surfaces you could possibly polarize the light itself, and then filter the reflections with an on-camera polarizer - but that's a complex setup and not something I've ever heard of actually being used.
Plus it's going to reduce your overall exposure by a couple of stops, which means you're going to need brighter lights just to get the correct exposure, or a faster lens or higher ISO to compensate. For most general shooting situations I can't see it being beneficial.
Yeah, that sounds like how I use it for still photography of things like oil paintings, where you don't want the spectrals obscuring the colors but still need to capture the texture.
But a bunch of reflective surfaces, unless they're mostly parallel like windows, will give off different angles of polarization.
In other words, I can't see it being used for 3-point lighting either, or much else except a very specific, technical situation.