Well I couldn’t resist, so I took my Infrared Camera to the Jock River Race 2009 and took over 800 photos in both IR and Visible. I’ve posted almost 500 of the images here on my flickr account: Jock River Race Photos from Graeme Hay of HayPhoto.ca
Just a Paddler on the Jock River
Keep on Shooting!
This week I’m going to take a bit of time and explain RGB in terms of Infrared photography.
First thing to not is that after 700nm any “light” your sensor sees isn’t really associated with the colour. Depending on where your filter cuts out the light you will get different effects, most notably is the deep IR B&W pictures where the filter cuts out light above 890nm. All said and done you end up with B&W images because all the channels (Red, Green, and Blue) are detecting the same amount of light.
But that is boring. B&W is a lot of fun once and a while, but sometimes you want to add some colour, or what more technically correct “false-colour”. Remembering that although your IR picture may be green, that isn’t real green, its faked by the sensor. So if you swap channels or play around with the amount of different “false-colours” in your picture you will always be right, as there is no wrong colour. Continue reading “Understanding RGB Channels in Infrared”
Well the inital colour balance I had set the camera too seems to work well, however it did need some adjusting.
So here are some pictures with the adjusted white balance (along with some Channel Swapping and B&W)
Continue reading “More Initial Infrared work - More Colour Balance”
The D70s-IR is now here, so I took some shots. Note that initially the camera shoots completely red (there is some other colours but they are hard to see). So a white balance adjustment is needed to make the pictures lookable.
Without White Balance:
Now that I am moving along with an IR Camera I realize that I need a bigger bag, currently my Micro Trekker 100 holds all my loot with the exception of a having to choose either the second camera or my Asus EEEPC in the front pouch. This leaves me with the task of finding a new bigger bag. Now that I have more gear I am looking a side bag or courier bag designed for camera equipment (At the time of this post there is a Twitter Contest for one here). Reason being is I want quick access to equipment and less bulk on my back.
So I’m waiting for my D70s-IR to arrive so that I can start on this site.
Now I’m currently shooting Nikon and with the D70s-IR I will be doing a quick initial Lens review using my current selection of lenses for IR photography.
Now with some googling I can figure out which of my Nikkors are going to fail, but my Tokinas, and many other off-branded lenses aren’t reviewed. Now, most Nikon shooters us Nikkor lenses but there is a growing segment who are using Tokinas, Sigmas, etc for Infrared because the coatings (and will see about the new NanoCoatings) are so good for visual light they may hinder your IR performance.
In the end an old lens may be better, and once I get my new IR camera in my hands, we shall see.
There are two ways to take Near Infrared Images, using an infrared filter or converting a camera to shoot infrared. Now there are some very serious benifits and disadvantages to each method.
Filters:
With a Filter your going to suffer from long expsoure times when you try to take a picture. 30seconds to Minutes depending on your camera choice and how good its internal IR blocking filter is.
Your filter will also be of a set size (say 77mm) and all your lenses need to fit that thread size so only a limited number of lenses, can be a pain if all your lenses are different filter sizes.
Upside is of course that you can use any camera you want, and you can still use the camera for normal photography.
Converted Camera:
Now if you convert a camera to IR (or some combination of) your only going to be able to take IR photos with that camera.
The plus side is that you can shoot relatively like normal (no long exposures, no black filter in-front of your camera messing with settings), there are some tweaks each system needs, but for the most part if your spending the money to convert a camera (or buy a pre-converted one) you know enough about back-focus, or stopping down to correct any minor issues you may have.
Conclusion:
If your just interested in trying it out, buy a filter on ebay for around $40 that will fit your favorite lens, if you got some money to burn or a spare older body, convert a camera instead. Next you’ll need to pick what range of IR do you want.