What's your usage of a polarizing filter?

I don't use a polarizing filter myself, but I understand cases when they can be useful. But browsing some photographers' pictures and notes, some photographers seem to have this filter slapped on to their lens all the time (I mean, c'mon!). And sometimes the resulting out-of-this-world colors makes me not like the pictures.

How often do you use a polarizing filter?

Much more so now that I live in the Mile High City of Denver. Being so much higher in altitude there's less atmosphere to diffuse the sunlight, so the polarizing lens helps quite a bit.

That being said, I have experienced the freakish coloring you refer to. In most cases it is a development problem, meaning you can take your prints back to the lab and ask them to correct or mute the colors to look more natural.

Polarizing lenses are particularly good for giving definition to clouds or snow, or to highlight greenish/blue tints, and in extremely bright light situations, in my experience. But since they also allow less light into your lens, so I haven't found them useful at all indoors, in shadowed areas, or after sunset.

I don't have my camera with me (sneaking on here at work), but the polarizer I use manually rotates, which allows me to play around with the tones, too. It's a graduated filter, meaning one side is darker than the other. The straight polarizing lenses are just too dark all over for my tastes.

Sorry some of my terminology is nontechnical. I'm self-taught, so don't know what filters and effects are really called in photo-jargon. Hope this was helpful none-the-less.

Reading your second to last paragraph above, I'm under the impression that you're talking about a graduated neutral density filter instead of a polarizing filter? Can that be the case? In my opinion, a graduated neutral density filter is a great filter to have. I wish I had one, but have not splurged on a filter system yet.