Looking at the world though pol coloured glasses

I've been a bit disappointed with some of the photos that I've taken with our D60. Don't get me wrong - I love the camera - I just wish that some of the pictures turned out as good as I saw them. A good (bad?) example of a disappointing picture is when we were hiking in Sa pa
.

The picture looks like crap compared to what I saw while I was there. So disappointing. My brother-in-law is also interested in photography, probably more than I am, and he wanted all kinds of filters for his birthday. He strongly insisted that I get a couple of filters, including a polarizer for my camera. So I started to do some reading and figured the artifacts that I wasn't happy with: glare from water, poor looking sky, vegetation that looks gray; all can be solved with a polarizer. It's not even something that can be fixed in software after the fact. Crap. Wish that I had known this before.

One reason why there has been such a disparity between what I saw and the pictures that were taken: my sunglasses are (linearly) polarized. All this time I thought that it was the cameras dynamic range being less than the eye. I guess that I don't have to focus on HDR photos to capture what I see.

The other shots that I was having troubles with? Taking longer exposures of things like moving water to get a really flowy effect can be solved with a neutral density. Below is my best hand-held attempt. I could only get the effect by taking a picture of a darker, less interesting part of the river.


I really wish that I had taken the photography class in high school. The fact that it conflicted with 2 other classes that I had to take to go to university, which forced me to do one class at night school, really sucks. I've read a book about photography, but I think I need to read more and / or take a class.