Adventures in Infrared

Took a quick 3 hour drive to Yosemite last Thursday. Using a Cokin 007 Infrared filter I came away with some alternative views of the iconic park.

I used a custom white balance that I had set a few days before. It was good enough to work with. I could have set a new one at the park, but I think the color shift would have looked pretty much the same.

A tripod was necessary for the 30 sec. exposures at f8. Focus was the major problem. I used the AF to get focus, then put the IR filter in front of the lens. I switched to Manual Focus for the exposure. My lens didn’t have an IR focus mark, and my only attempt to fake the IR focus by turning the focus ring to what I thought might be better resulted in an extremely out-of-focus shot.

I shot RAW+jpeg so I could get an approximation of the color shift of the shot on my LCD. Once I opened the file from Adobe Camera Raw I got pretty much what I saw on the screen at the time I made the shot. Any light leaks between the filter (hand-held!) and the lens resulted in bright blue alien orbs dancing across the image.

I ran through one battery and part of another taking the 50+ images. I was impressed for the most part with the strange but beautiful color shifts caused by the IR filter. It was slow work though. These images were only slightly adjusted in PS. More work would need to be done for final imaging. I lost several to focus problems and light leaks. Fun though.