Category Archives: polarization

Searching for Sub-Visual Atmospheric Structures in the Daytime Sky








Some of my resulting pictures:

Author: Deane Williams, Connecticut, USA


Colours in Citric Acid


Author: Rolf Kohl, Germany

Plastic objects in polarized light

Very exiting to experiment with plastic in front of polarized light sources. This is a simple foil from a cracker box put in front of a TFT(!) Monitor. Somehow not every foil or plastic object produces these colours. I tried a cup from the hospital I brought home, the top of a little box for keeping minerals and this foil with success. Best results can be reached by switching the monitor in a single white surface, then put the item in front, darken the room and use a pole filter with the camera. Turning the objects slightly produces different ranges of colour. Once I observed this effect even in the daylight on a plastic windshield of a motor-cycle with a pole filter on my camera.

Here still a further picture of Windshield of a motorcycle 90 degrees away from the sun, viewed through a polfilter on a Canon Reflex Camera.

More pictures: 12345

Author: Rolf Kohl

Polarized Light in Nature




Direct access is also possible: (English version)
or (Dutch version),

Author: Günther Können, Netherlands

Polarization Colours in Airplane Window

Patrice Touhar took this photograph through the window of an airplane using a polarization filter and so made these polarization colours appear.

The colours are generated by the combination of three circumstances:

1. There is polarized light behind the window
2. The window is made of a double refracting matter
3. A polarization filter is used in front of the window

Under these circumstances, the light gets split up into two coherences of polarized components which travel through the window at different speeds. This causes a phase difference the amount of which depends from the wavelength. This means that the polarization gets transformed once into a linear polarization of a different direction than the origin for a certain colour, and into a circular polarization for another colour (Lissagiu interference of two waves). As the polarization is now dependent from the colour, the colours appear when a polarization filter is used, no matter if this filter is placed in front of the eye or in front of a camera.

These colours can be seen and photographed under the following circumstances:

1. There is polarized on one side of the window coming from the blue sky (Rayleigh scattering) and reflection from water and the scattering caused by clouds
2. The window is made of plastic. In this material there are mechanical tensions which cause a double refraction.
3. There is a polarization filter in front of the camera.

The last condition is not necessary if you look at the window from an acute angle. Then the light becomes already polarized by the refraction. In this case there is no filter necessary to see the colours. However, the colours you can see under this circumstance are fainter than the colours seen through the polarization filter because refraction polarizes only a part of the light.

You can also find another observation of this kind in this former thread.

Colours in the airplane window

While flying from Izmir to Ankara in Turkey on monday the 2nd of April 2007 at 10.15am Selen Ediger wanted to take an aerial shot of the mountains below with my canon ef 10-22mm lens and Hoya multi coated polarizing filter. With naked eye the colors were not visible but when she looked through the camera she saw that the land and the sky was covered with rainbow colors. The contrast and the saturation are adjusted a bit.

What’s the origin of this colours?