You cannot have followed this journal for long without surmising that I’m a sky freak. I didn’t think much about meteorology until I became a helicopter pilot. Then I became fascinated by the sky.

Today we went out to Pig Island for our regular Saturday outing on the briny deep. The sky was magnificent.

I usually use a polarizer filter when shooting outdoors because it darkens the blue of the sky and reduces the undesirable types of reflections from the surface of water.

My new camera, though I like it very much otherwise, has an awkward and expensive arrangement for fitting a filter on the front of the lens. I haven’t bothered to buy the parts yet.

As I was scanning the sky looking for good shots, I thought of my clip-on polarized sunglasses. Feeling a little silly, I tried holding one lens of my clippies over the lens of my camera as I took the shot. Voila! A polarizer filter!

If your sunglasses are relatively flat and have no prescription, you might want to give this a try. You can tilt you head side to side or take them off and rotate them a bit while looking at the sky to find the best effect. You’ll usually get the best effect at about 90° from the sun with the sunglasses held in the normal position (same as when you’re wearing them).

Then try taking a couple of shots with your camera – one while holding one of your sunglass lenses directly in front of your camera lens (the closer the better) and one without.

Here’s the west end of Pig Island looking north up the coast. This is approximately what you would get without a polarizing effect:

Here’s what you might expect with a strong polarizing effect – either from a good polarizing filter or a high quality grey polarizing sunglass lens:

If your sunglasses are polarized, but the tint is brown, you’re in luck if you’re going to sea, because that is by far the best combination for water sports. However, you’ll be out of luck with the sunglass polarizer effect for your camera unless you have the proper mode on your camera (RAW Mode) and Photoshop on your computer to correct for the brown tint.

Anyway, it’s something you can play with – enough technical stuff.

This is looking out to the southeast toward the Rai Coast: 

The sky seems to me to be a huge canvas on which the painting is forever changing and is never the same twice.

After a couple of beers, I spotted this cloud that reminds me of Australia: 

Okay . . . a little bit like Australia.