Use of Polarizer Filter | Travel and Landscape Photos | Photo Forum

I generally leave a UV and CPF on both my lenses all the time, unless it’s indoor or night photography.
The UV will help cut out haze, and CPF will help add some richness to those shots, most noticeable will be sky and water shots.
CPF can also be adjusted to have little to no noticeable effect on your photos.
Hope that helps a little bit. Enjoy your cruise.

Myself I just got the off the shelf, “Sunpac” from a nearby Wal-Mart. They usually carry the 52 and 58mm may have others elsewhere.
It comes with UV and CPF set not expensive but work well. I usually always keep a UV on my lenses mainly for protection of the main lens. Hope that’s at least a bit helpful!

From my experience, the polarizer is only useful in a few situations: Darkening blue skies and reducing reflections. HOWEVER, there are a lot of times when you should NOT use one.

On a sunny day, you can make the blue sky much darker. -But this really only works in certain parts of the sky. It works best when looking 90 degrees away from the sun. Aiming it toward the sun or 180 degrees from the sun has very little effect. If you look at the sky on a sunny day with your naked eye, you’ll see that the area of the sky around 90 degrees from the sun already looks darker blue. This is where the polarizer will make the most difference. In the ideal situation, you can get a beautiful dark blue sky and extremely bright, white clouds. But this won’t happen in all areas of the sky or in all weather conditions.

If you are shooting water, you can usually adjust the polarizer to make the water look crystal clear, or totally invisible, by removing the layer of reflection from the surface. At the beach, this effect can make the water look amazingly clear and beautiful (like in a travel brochure) but it can sometimes look unnatural since we expect to see some reflection on the water’s surface.

The wrong time to use a polarizer is when photographing people. I have found that the polarizer will either remove or exaggerate reflections off human skin. In both cases, the result looks bad. If the refelections are increased, the skin looks way too shiney. If the reflections are removed, the skin has a “matte” appearance, making it look very unnatural and unflattering.

I would definitely suggest getting a circular polarizer, but be sure to experiment with it a lot. You will quickly realize when to use it and when not to.