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Polarization

Polarization refers to the process of restricting light waves to only oscillate on one axis.

Example of two polarizers along the X and Y axis[1]

This is an example of two orthogonal polarizing filters, one which filters along the x axis, the other filters along the y axis.

Uses of Polarizing Filters

Polarizing filters are commonly used in photography to reduce glare from reflective surfaces in photographs. Natural light is unpolarized. When unpolarized light gets reflected at a steep angle it gets polarized [2] as seen in this illustration:

Pajs, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A polarizing filter can be adjusted to filter out exactly this polarized angle, resulting in a photo with much less glare. The example below shows the same image a) with a polarizer and b) without polarizer.

Example of reducing glare using a polarizing filter

Cross Polarization

  1. de:Benutzer:Averse, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons ↩︎

  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster's_angle ↩︎

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