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Recently I've received a handful of questions regarding my digital infrared
photography. I've only been shooting IR for a year or two, so I'm hardly an
expert at this. I actually love color and color photographs, but there's
something so interesting in the possibilities of IR coupled with digital photography. I figured I could
help shed some light on the subject, and hopefully get
more useful tips from others out there who shoot IR. So here goes nothing....
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My "rig"
I am using a Canon G3 with a R72 IR filter. Sure, it's not a fancy digital
SLR, but I like to travel light and don't have all the money in the world to
spend on this. As for the filter, this is the "cheapie" IR filter, with
other more expensive versions available. I have no interest in the
scientific descriptions of the properties of light, so I'll stick with my
cheapie from ebay. If anyone out there has used any of the other
alternatives, I'd love to hear your thoughts (as long as you can explain
things in layman's terms).
Noise vs. blur
The first thing you'll notice is that the IR filter makes things really,
really dark. Expect exposure times to increase significantly, even in
bright sunlight. This first led me to believe that it would be best to
increase my ISO to 400 and get "faster" shutterspeeds to compensate for the lack of light. That was true to an extent but IMHO, I don't think that the increase in shutterspeed is worth the increased noise. The G3 is a great
camera, but it definately wasn't made to operate over 200 ISO.
Since that time, I've done a complete 180 and started shooting IR at an ISO
of 50. The noise problem has definately subsided somewhat, but now I am
struggling with ridiculously long shutterspeeds. I've discovered how
critical a tripod is, but the wind still plays havoc with photos of trees.
If anything, I've learned that infrared photography is a test of one's
patience.
For "Watermane", the long exposure time actually helped me because I think it helped to saturate the color a bit more. (Not sure if that's 100% true, but it seems that way to me.)
White balance discoveries
When I first started, photos direct from my camera were all red. Not the
prettiest photos in the world, but I've found a few things that work to
improve on them.
1. Desaturate / Level adjustment
Take those nasty red images, desaturate them, then auto level and you should have something somewhat interesting to look at. This is how I started out with all of my IR pics.
2. Desaturate / Color adjust
Desaturate those same nasty red images, then tint the photo
3. Custom White Balance
What I'm doing differently to get blue/orange tones is a combination of 2
different things. First, I custom set my white balance. For "Watermane", I set the white balance to what is pictured in the middle of that photo. I'm not sure what color that was, but I've found that experimenting and trying different colors leads to some interesting results when shooting IR.
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Straight from the camera,
custom white balance |
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| After auto levels (better saturation) |
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Straight from the camera,
auto white balance |
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| After auto levels (better saturation) |
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Second, I intensified the levels a bit using photoshop. Luckily, I'm a web
designer by day, so I've been using the program for quite a while and can
tweak photos as necessary. For my first 4 years with digital photography,
I've always thought that using PS to "fix" photos was a sin. Now I've come
to realize that doing anything you can to improve the vision isn't necessarily cheating, as long as you don't go overboard and end up with something completely different from what came from the camera. I can honestly say that Watermane and all of my recent IR photos are very close to what I shot.
So in review, experiment with your white balance, tweak in PS...
Hope that helps. If you have any more questions, please let me know. If you'd like to see more of my IR work, I'll be posting more in the upcoming weeks so stay tuned...
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