Critique Welcomed IR Gazebo Thingy

[Keith Hollister]

And the IR fun continues

Untitled by Keith Hollister, on Flickr

 

[John Allen]

Now this is a more typical IR shot. Very cool. Or should I say 'warm'?

 

[Keith Hollister]

Another "inside the box" IR shot from today ...

Untitled by Keith Hollister, on Flickr

 

[John Allen]

That second one is great! I don't hand out many exclamation points, so take it for what it's worth.

 

[Julian de'Courcy]

Keith, IR I have never liked or disliked yet tried and struggled to see what those who appreciate it do see. Although I do recognise the quality here albeit not understanding it.
Good job well done and can see for IR work you know what you are doing.

 

[Keith Hollister]

Thanks, guys.

John - the second image here is your classic monochrome IR type of shot (stereotypical even) in both subject and the full blown Wood Effect (after Robert Wood, a pioneer in IR photography). Glad you liked it.

Julian - I appreciate the vote of confidence but as this is my first color IR camera, I've been figuring things out at a rapid pace the last couple days. I was really pulling my hair out until I realized that swapping the red & blue channels (a common false color IR technique) only yields the expected result if you are working in a sRGB color space. Doing that with an AdobeRGB or ProPhotoRGB image in PS results in something very different. Even the folks at Life Pixel were stumped on that one.

 

[Rob MacKillop]

Wow. Impressive. At first I thought the first one was a double exposure. Really interesting.

 

[Keith Hollister]

Wow. Impressive. At first I thought the first one was a double exposure. Really interesting.

Thanks. IR photography is fascinating. In monochrome, you get that ghostly ethereal look (like with the old Kodak HIE film), but with the color stuff (where the filters allow more low frequency visible light to pass) it gets a lot more creative. It's sorta the Salvador Dali approach to photography, but with color/tonality distortions, not geometry.

Whats really fun is that IR works best in the exact opposite situations that are favorable for conventional photography - mid-day bright sunlight is what you want, not moderate lighting. Foliage in full shade does not exhibit the Wood Effect and the IR images will be very low contrast and bland.

It is also way more practical with mirrorless than with SLR's due to focusing issues. With SLR's, you had to worry about lenses focusing differently than with visible light. With mirrorless, the viewfinder and AF sensors are the imaging sensor, so no focus offset is required. You still have to select lenses that don't hotspot in IR though.

 

[Keith Hollister]

If anyone is interested in the science behind this, this paper published by the European Journal of Physics is a good overview of how near-IR photography works. It is technical but not excessively geeky (of course I'm a retired electrical engineer, so I may not be a good arbiter of that)

http://www.montana.edu/jshaw/documents/NIR Photography - Mangold et al - EJP2013.pdf

 

[Ivar Dahl-Larsen]

I can only say, whatever it is IR or not, I like it for what I see, especially the last one.

 

[Aaron J. Heiner]

I wish I could get that glow from digital IR like the old HIE Kodak film. I've gone so far as to fumble with Photoshop to try and get that glow, but I just can't seem to get it right. Looks like yours does a better job of getting close to the old Kodak glow than either of my two IR cameras would.