Update on the Gold”n”Blue filter

A few months back I wrote about my experience with the Singh-Ray Gold’n’Blue polarizing filter. Some people rightly made the point that it was expensive and the use of filters in Photoshop (or plugins) could do the same. I’m not so sure and recently used it in my trip to Tampa and surrounding area. On the boiling hot and humid day that is a Florida summer, I tend to minimize the equipment I carry and so I put my new 16-35mm F4 lens on my Canon and fitted the gold’n’blue to it. First – I didn’t really see any vignetting – the filter is sufficiently thin to avoid that. I also noticed that you had to be careful (as with any polarizer) for certain issues in the sky with a wide angle – the effect on darkening the sky is strongest at 90 degrees to the sun and gets weaker as you approach 180 degrees (ie sun behind you). That is the same with this polarizer and occasionally I had to back off the color change to account for this physical phenomenon. However, I found that it could almost always improve the almost greyish blue of a summer sky in the humid south with a much brighter more saturated look. Here is the image I took of a boardwalk path leading to the ocean with no filter. I was using the 24-105mm lens at this stage. I have processed this as much as I could in Lightroom to improve the sky and the contrast between sky and clouds:
No Filter on humid summer day in Florida
Then I went back to the car to get the wide angle lens, added the filter and started taking images with intent of maximizing the blue in the sky. This is the same location about 10 minutes later:
With Gold’n’Blue Filter

Quite an improvement (in my view) to the previous one. I continued using that same lens and filter for the next couple of hours as I made my way up the coast. Here is one of some sea oats with the yellow sun shades on Madeira Beach in the background. I used F4 on this to try to get close to the plant and blur the background. The lens was set to 30mm for this one (on a full frame). Again, a lovely deep blue sky, which was nothing like the image I was seeing at the time. Remember – stock photography is not about what something looks like, but how you can create an emotion in the reader that makes them want to go there!
Madeira Beach, Florida, with Gold’n’Blue Filter