Not a good Infrarred Day

Cape May, NJ. 5/2008

Not all days are good for shooting in Infrarred. The experts say that the days or the times that seem to be good for regular photography are not good for Infrarred photography. My problem is that I still don't know what is a good day for regular photography, let alone infrared. And besides, when you find yourself at a place, with your infrared camera, you better start shooting it. Just in case...

So that was not a good day for IR photography. Looking back, the sun was bright, there were no clouds and the lighthouse at Cape May did not reflect much IR right. The tree leaves did some, but overall, all the pictures had a strong color cast.

After some processing, mostly adjusting the neutral tones, this is what I get:

Changing it a little bit, gives me this one. Nothing too different, just the cast is a bit different.

Or with choosing a different point as my neutral one:

They were all basically the same color distribution, just a different cast. The one below is applying a sepia filter after converting to black and white IR:

And finally just a regular B&W:

So nothing to be too excited about as far as IR photography goes.

Playing with White Balance

Or better, I should say playing with the neutral point as part of the post processing after an IR shot. The fist picture being B&W does not require this type of adjustment, but I just showed it for comparison.

Now, when we start venturing into the land of false color things can be a bit more complex. After all, we do not see infrared, so any color information is not real. Pretty much we choose what we like or what we find appealing.

It is all about choosing some pixels and deciding that those pixels will be the neutral reference based on our preferences.

All these three false color pictures have color information very similar to one another. Depending on the pixels that we choose the results may be totally useless. These are just three modes of pictures that I found acceptable.

Despite the overall change of color cast there are some colors that remain unchanged. At the very end, the color is not there so your choice is as good as mine.

More water, serenity and tranquility

All these pictures are from the same place as the last post. They come from experimenting with several conversions to false color, especially setting up the white balance. We'll see how it goes later, when I have more control over the white balance when taking the picture. I have some other IR taken in RAW, but I still need to learn how to deal with that. One of these days. Meanwhile, some others that I like.

I like this one below. The white of the trees always seems very appealing.

More water and trees.

And a place to sit down, relax and contemplate what is around us.