Tips & Tricks: Polarizers

Our director Bill Strohm shares unique tips on using circle polarizing filters for indoor video production and photography shoots. Many think polarizers can only be used outdoors, but over the years Bill has found them extremely useful for run and gun shoots.

On skin, polarizers are great for reducing glare and reflections. If you don’t have access to a makeup artist, this is a handy trick. Circle polarizers are also useful for tabletop product video and photography. We demonstrate in the video with a glass whiskey bottle. The polarizer allows you to control glare and reflections on the bottle without extra equipment. The bottle is placed on a wooden table. You can also manipulate saturation and glare on the table surface with the polarizer.

An important note - when using polarizers indoors, they must be circle polarizers. Linear polarizers are not compatible with modern DSLR cameras. This can cause metering errors and incorrectly exposed images. Circle polarizers pass light to DSLR mirrors evenly regardless of angle.

This video demonstrates how useful circle polarizing filters can be for indoor video production and photography. Try it out and let us know how it goes! 📸