Other Worldly

Infrared Red Composite

Occassionally while out shooting I'll get a "what if?" situation. Well, I get that a lot. What if I shot it from this angle, with these settings, from this side, from that side, etc. I think of those as normal what ifs, the kind of questions I asking and answering without thinking of it. This was more of a what if from left field. What if I screwed my infrared filter on top of my neutral density filter? So while waiting for my sunset shot for +Weekly Photo Project 2013  I thought I'd see what I'd get. The obvious answer is a long exposure even with a good amount of light available. The IR shot came in at 20 seconds with an aperture of 4.3. It really smoothed out the water, as a 20 second exposure should. I used a saved white balance setting that I've used for previous IR shots and got a very yellow monochrome shot. I took the one shot as the light was getting starting to do what I had in mind for my weekly shot. So I promptly forgot about this IR shot until I was looking at it again in Aperture.

Infra Yellow! Straight out of camera

So I played around with the white balance dropper in Aperture trying to find something that gets rid of the yellow and gives me something to work with. Honestly that's about the extent of my IR workflow because I can't seem to easily do a color channel switch that leaves things like the foliage that blue-green color and only effects the sky or the ground, or water in this case. I actually liked the dull grey water in this shot and just wanted to do something with the sky. So I cheated. I took the sky out from a "normal" shot I had taken just before the IR shot and masked it into the IR shot. I don't normally like to do this, but since it's an IR shot to begin with all sense of realism goes out the window to begin with.

This is a learning shot. This isn't a shot I'd call representative of my work, but it was a fun exercise. So what are some takeaways? Shooting with the IR filter results in some serious ugly noise. Especially in the shadowy areas. I think keeping the ND filter on only compounded this problem. It could be to do with the quality of the filter(s) or even the white balance setting I used on the camera. In hindsight I shouldn't have used the stored white balance setting that was used for a grassy field. As happens every time I shoot in IR I see potential in what I get and it makes me want to do a full IR conversion. But most glaring is I need to find some better IR workflows.