32mm f/1.4 lens + CPL -- Beachside Backdrops (PICS)

Lost99999 wrote:

Did you do a lot of post processing or are OOC JPEGS fairly similar?

Hi Lost9999,
Most of the time the JPEGs are fairly similar.  I often adjust the levels slightly in shots taken without a CPL filter.  I try to get a good image straight out of the camera each time but sometimes I'll need to correct colors.  Especially since I rarely do a white-balance correction these days and its probably necessary if I'm using a CPL filter.  If my WB is set to Auto I tend to only need to correct the exposure and alter the Blue hues slightly.  The high contrast applied by CPL filters means there's usually not much Dynamic Range to play with because the shadows tend to quite stark.
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When I use a CPL filter in daylight it tends to increase contrast and mutes areas that might otherwise overexpose.  Another thing these filters tend to do is "warm up" certain tones, sometimes abnormally so... for example: certain colors.  The sky looked less blue and a bit more steely grey out of the camera.  It really depends on the light in each shot.  Where the sun is and how the polarizing filter is used makes a big difference with each shot. I think that without the use of the filter the water surface wouldn't be transparent as it appears below...
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M6 + 32mm f/1.4 lens + Hoya CPL filter - Before and after - not much difference aside from the sky.
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With the shots I took the other day at the beach, the sand was an odd orange color with ugly patches of grey.  No yellow-white sand on this little beach. Some of this is decaying plant matter but the red is from volcanic ironstone in the area and the grey is from volcanic deposits that breaks out on the surface. It makes for an ugly sand color here.... I should have picked a different beach for any shots showing the sand up close.  I even thought about buying coral to hang the earrings on and scoopfuls of tiny white shells from a nearby store... but that's the sort of thing you'd do with a paid job.  Not this. 
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The effect of a CPL filter - aimed at a footpath and rotated to three different positions...

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I think a lot of photographers don't realize how much a CPL filter can change the way light interacts with a surface.  When the sun is in certain positions in the sky, the results can vary greatly, even if shooting from the same position each time.  Even in the example above showing three shots taken of a footpath, you can see how much the color varies from one shot to another.   There's two other UNEDITED images below that were taken yesterday.  I picked them randomly but you can see what the exposure and colors were like straight out of the camera here...  Note how different the colors are in each of the two UNEDITED shots below.  This is because I had the White Balance set to Auto.  I probably ought to have locked it down to Daylight settings for these shots.
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M6 + 32mm + CPL - UNEDITED with no corrections, just resizing.

M6 + 32mm + CPL - UNEDITED - Note the shift in color - because I didn't lock down the WB

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The people shooting RAW have to edit their images regardless.  They need to make quite a few adjustments for each and every image and sometimes use "batch editing" to bring a series of pictures taken with identical settings up to a publishing level.  Those of us shooting in JPEG have the camera's processor do most of this work but the results of the use of a Circular Polarizer can make or break an image.  There are times when I don't bother to use a CPL filter and the results are often lovely. But on a beach environment during daylight hours I find the use of a CPL necessary.  But whilst older PowerShot models from Canon used to give me plenty of consistency with White Balance, I find that the White Balance on the EOS M cameras seems to fluctuate from shot to shot (see examples above).  Usually the colors are consistent but occasionally they jump.
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I like that there's room to edit JPEGs from the EOS M cameras.  If you don't want to you don't usually need to.  But it's nice to have the freedom of movement to do so if you want.  For the shots above (of the earrings), I think shooting in RAW would produce a slightly smoother image with less chance of banding where the color and tonal variations transit.  But I'm okay with these.  Some shots below show show other benefits of using a CPL filter over water... And the earrings above look more translucent because the external reflections on the outer glass glazing were reduced by the filter.  They look like this to the eye although the reflections ad yet another layer of depth.  Again, if this was a paid shoot I'd have taken shots with the filter rotated to various positions.  But they were fun to take and you learn something new each time you take photographs in a new place under different conditions.
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Canon Pro1 - the effects of a CPL on water  (taken with my old Pro1 camera)

EOS M - Showing the difference a polarizer makes when rotated.

Canon Pro1 - Waikiki Beach - using a CPL to remove water reflections & enhance color. 
This image has been processed in both Lightroom and Photoshop but the Pro 1 camera was known for processing an image nicely.

Canon Pro1 -  to be honest, I regret not being able to duplicate these colors on the beaches I'm currently able to access here where I am in Australia.  The position of the sun, the consistency of the sand and the nature of the light all play a part in the results.