Photo Answers

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Photo shop front

Q I want to take photographs of local shop window displays, but I find that my polarising filter is not cutting out the reflections. Do you have any suggestions?

John Johnstone

A A polarising filter suppresses the reflections created by a polarised light source, but if reflections in the windows are caused by an unpolarised light source, it will have little or no effect. A fully polarised light source like a computer screen can usually be eliminated entirely and turned black with a polariser, but with different lights striking windows from different angles at night, it would be tricky to filter out all the polarised light on an entire shop window.

There is no sure-fire way of getting rid of all the reflected light both from inside and out, so you