DIY Polariser

I've been getting bored with some of the macro shots I've been taking recently. After I built the ringlight I was able to get some really cool close ups with some interesting lighting patterns. With this in mind I put together a really simple cross polariser. The result of my first set of shots with this setup is below - a photo of a CD tray.



The making of this photo is incredibly simple, and all you need is two polarising filters. One is on the camera, and relatively speaking this is the cheap one. The other goes behind the object you are photographing, with a fairly bright light source behind that. So, the polariser between the light source and the object needs to be bigger. Polarising film is not too cheap, but luckily I was given an old broken laptop a while back.

An LCD screen uses polarised light in order to work, and therefore has a polarising film built in. I stripped away the casing and was left with a bare screen made up of several bits of plastic (LCD screen, a few clear magnifiers etc, a clear piece of nice solid acrylic); unfortunately the polariser was stuck to the LCD screen, and as shown in the photo below needed to be pulled away...



After removing the polarising film, I did spend a while trying to remove the sticky residue and flatten it out, before realising it would be much simpler to stick it down to the nice and rigid piece of acrylic which also came out of the screen.



After that, it was just a quick job to set up a bright light below the polariser, and take a few photos of various bits of plastic.