When I moved to Moscow from the south of Russia (where my parents live), for the first two weeks every day was pretty much the same – wake up, look for a job, go for a walk, deal with the doom and gloom of the deep autumn. One day I woke up and everything looked different, felt different… I could see the tree shadows on the wall of my room, what the heck? Turns out it was sunny outside! It was time to dust up my sunglasses.

Now, moving on – I live in Dubai, UAE, a country that is known for having plenty of sunlight (we do, however, have epic rains at times). Life without sunglasses is difficult here (if you cherish keeping your eyesight functioning until old age). However, most of the sunglasses shops (and there are a lot of them) sell polarized glasses. When ordering sunglasses online, they don’t even mention if the glasses are polarized or not… then you end up dealing with the same frustrations as me when trying to take photos outdoors with your sunglasses on.

What’s Good About Polarized Sunglasses

They reduce some glare and you can see through the water, the sky is bluer and the grass is greener.

What’s Not Good About Polarized Sunglasses

When viewing screens of devices, there is a color shift, weird lines, and sometimes complete darkness. I think if the screen of the device is already polarized, then you will see complete darkness when pairing it together with your glasses.

Here is one of the frustrations to deal with when shooting with Ricoh GRiiiX – when wearing polarized glasses – if I try to shoot a vertical photo, I can’t see anything on the screen. So, my options are either to remove the glasses and be blinded by the sun, or just hope that it focused on what I intended and that the composition is ok. To be honest, if you shoot regularly with this camera, you can compose without looking at the screen, but that’s not the point of having a screen, is it?

Faced the same issues with Fujifilm X-Pro2 but in horizontal orientation.

And in the viewfinder, it is the same story, if you use EVF. This is when you kinda feel glad that you have the option of OVF.

I have to say that Fujifilm X100V, XT-4 and Canon R5 are all doing fine with the polarized sunglasses. There are some color changes in the screen and the viewfinder, but at least you can see.

I didn’t notice a lot of people complaining about these issues, but then maybe all of you live in the countries where you go out taking photos without glasses.

I guess, the bottom line would be if you do not want to think about issues like the ones described above, do not buy polarized sunglasses. Or wear a cap?

In any case let me know your thoughts.

Now get out

and take some photos,

Anna