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I've been shooting digital infrared photographs for a few years now, and it's still a bit of a crapshoot. When I'm out, I find myself constantly asking, "How will this scene look in IR?"
In the past, the only real way to answer the question has been to setup my tripod, switch filters on my camera and fire away. But now I'm slowly beginning to realize certain things about infrared and it's relationship to sunlight.
The following is one such observation...
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Shooting into the Sun
The other day, I was at a lake in Smithfield looking to take some infrared photographs. I like to go to lakes and ponds because they're open areas where I'm guaranteed some good, strong sunlight for IR.
So I setup my camera, opened up the LCD and panned from left to right to see what was worth a picture.
So I'm panning back and forth and it occurs to me that shooting into the morning sun would give me the best color, but some horrible lens flare as well. What is a man to do? Use the shadows...
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If you click on the photos above, you can see how strong the orange colors come across. That's because the sun was almost directly in front of me for all 3 pics. The trick is blocking the sun's direct path to the camera lens without showing up in the photograph.
My favorite technique for doing this is to hide behind tree shadows. What I do is stradle the long shadow of a tree and either shoot directly toward the tree or at a slight angle to the tree (as you can see in the first 2 photos).
The 3rd photo was taken by shooting directly in line with the sun, but tilting the angle of the camera down a bit to pick up more of the sun's reflection off the water. As you can see, the orange color isn't as intense as the other photos, but I think that was because I was
shooting in early morning sun where the other photos were more of a late morning sun. Another thing to note is that the reflected IR in the water is darker than the sky. I'm not quite sure why that is, but I'll be sure to look for it more in the future...
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Shooting at an Angle to the Sun
Obviously the sun influences the appearance of infrared photographs, but I've never consciously thought about whether I was shooting into the sun or away from it. The next 3 photos were taken on the same days as the first group, but for these I shot at an angle to the sun.
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As you can see, the sky isn't as impressive because there's no real color to it. I really like the level of detail in these, but they're pretty flat with no real punch.
So where does that leave us? I'm gonna say that color IR and b+w IR are 2 completely different animals. If you're looking to shoot color IR you should definately keep in mind the position of the sun in your photo. You might even want to consciously position the sun in your color IR pic.
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