Marley is framed by a portion of Dale Chihuly’s “PLU Rose” as he follows his master back to the office in the Mary Baker Russell Music Center at Pacific Lutheran University, February 8, 2012.

Machines slowly chew away at the south stands of Husky Stadium at the University of Washington in Seattle, January 3, 2012. The project includes complete demolition and reconstruction of the lower bowl and south side stands, updated club and luxury suites, installation of permanent east end zone seating and construction of a 200-space parking garage. Husky football home games will be at Century Link Field in 2012 and they are expected to return to Husky Stadium for the 2013 season.

Dheaven (cq) Webber waves good-bye to Santa after he, his sister Promise Caruthers and mom Monica Ayers received Christmas gifts from The Salvation Army’s Angel Toy & Joy store at the Tacoma Elks Lodge. The Salvation Army, in association with the Elks and Toys for Tots, anticipates handling out toys and food for 1,700 to 2,000 Pierce County families from Thursday through Saturday. Local Walmart stores donated 340 bicycles and $25,000 cash.

Pierce County Sheriff Paul Pastor lights the first candle during the menorah lighting and Chanukah Celebration outside the Pantages Theater in downtown Tacoma on Tuesday, December 20, 2011. (Lui Kit Wong/Staff photographer)

Kathie and son Wyatt Pritchard of Auburn were some of the best-dressed among thousands runners in the 17th annual Norpoint Turkey Trot in Northeast Tacoma, November 24, 2011. It included a 5k run, a two-mile run/walk, and a kid’s trot.

A couple of people were a bit puzzled by the reflection of the Elks Lodge seen in today’s page A-1 shot of an interior scene in Old City Hall. Here’s how it came to be.

The landlord wouldn’t allow us inside Old City Hall, so I snooped around for windows to look into and found a vacated photographer’s studio in the northwest corner of the building across Commerce street from the old Elks. When shooting through a window we usually want to eliminate any reflections so the camera lens is pushed up against the glass.

That’s what I did for a couple of frames, then I noticed that when I pulled back from the window a couple of inches, the white Elks Lodge in the bright sunlight behind me popped into view on the left. I still didn’t want reflections elsewhere in the shot, so I rearranged my arms, head and torso to block the view of other sunlit things behind me. So, in theory, in this shot there are also reflections off the window glass of my camera, hands, head, arms, et cetera, but all that stuff was in deep shade and not bright enough to actually show up in reflection.

What about a polarizing filter?

They are occasionally useful for eliminating reflections, but only in a very limited way. Reflections can be blocked by a polarizer if the light in them is polarized, and light is only polarized by reflections at certain angles. Recalling college freshman physics (you remember, don’t you?), reflected light is 100% polarized only at Brewster’s Angle, which, for an air-to-glass boundary, is not far from 45º. So when shooting through glass obliquely one can benefit from a polarizer.

But there’s another limitation on top of that. Most shots attempted through glass are with a wide angle lens, so for much of the frame, the angle of view toward the glass is NOT at Brewster’s Angle. The result is that the reflection is eliminated by the polarizer in only one spot in a wide angle photo and the rest of the reflection is effectively undimmed.

It’s easy to see this without a camera. Stand outside a window in the daytime, or inside a lit room at night, look through a polarizer (rotating it to whatever orientation is needed), and you’ll see the fuzzy-edged spot on the window where there’s no reflection.

And I can’t resist another polarizer tip here: they work well for deepening a blue sky, but, similar to reflections, only at a certain angle. Light scattered by our atmosphere (the blue light in a blue sky) is maximally polarized when viewed at 90º from the sun. When you look through a polarizer at other angles, the sky is little affected.

The practical way to predict whether it’s useful to deploy a polarizer on a sunny day is to point toward the sun, then sweep your other arm around while holding it perpendicular to the first one. You’ve just defined a “great circle” around yourself where the sky is maximally polarized.

These are some of the limitations that explain why I only use my polarizer about once every few years.

Dana Falsko, 5, of University Place finds her perfect pumpkin at Double R Farms just off River Road near Puyallup.

Mike Heavey of Seattle gets some oomph out of his pumpkin slingshot at Double R Farms just off River Road near Puyallup.

A crowd watches one of the pig races at Maris Farms near Buckley.

Stephanie Johnson joins dozens of other employees from Davita’s Tacoma corporate business office performing one of their “Village Service Days”, in this case clearing ivy and blackberry vines from Garfield Park and planting conifer trees. The volunteer work was organized by the public-private effort called Green Tacoma Partnership. “It’s not just free labor. We get community buy-in and education, ” said organizer Kory Kramer, South Sound Green Cities Project Manager of Cascade Land Conservancy.

Roger Hamel (left) and Richard Roy assemble the head of an African bull elephant that they have been working on at Roger’s Northwest Taxidermy in Lakewood. The animal is estimated to have been over 50 years old when it was legally shot in Zimbabwe by a resident of this area. The skin of the whole animal was dried and shipped back for mounting.