IR Chrome

Time-ball station, Lyttelton Harbour

My latest camera arrived in the post the other day. It's a Canon Elph, converted to full-spectrum infrared and fitted with the latest IR Chrome filter from KolariVision. I might talk about the Elph later, for now, this is about the IR Chrome filter.

The IR Chrome filter was designed to replicate the look of Kodak's Aerochrome film from the days when we all shot film. Aerochrome is now history and I never got to use it, so I don't know how well this filter matches the original film look. What I do know, after only a short acquaintance, is that it produces some stunning results.

Pearson Park, Oxford

What the IR Chrome filter does, is capture quite natural colours in everything that doesn't reflect infrared wavelengths. Anything reflecting infrared (grass, trees, etc.) is produced in brilliant red tones. Seeing everything that should be green, represented in red, can be a bit disconcerting at first but somehow the simple green/red swap doesn't seem as confronting as some other false-colour infrared representations.

It's important to get a good white balance set in the camera and this filter white balances to a very high Kelvin - something north of 50,000K (normal daylight photography is around 6,000K). Fortunately, the Elph can handle this but, if you shoot RAW, your RAW converter may not - mine tops out at 50,000K but many won't go beyond 25,000K and that's just not enough for the look you see here.

Provided that the camera can set an appropriate white balance, then the JPG files from the camera will have the correct white balance baked in and that is what I have been using for these shots - until I resolve the RAW processing issue.

Sumner Beach looking towards Cave Rock

It's not all brilliant reds, sometimes it just pink; like these tiny black muscles clinging to the rocks but reflecting infrared, and the trees and bushes - too distant to make a bold statement. It's a strange world that this IR Chrome filer portrays, but one worth exploring and full of new compositional opportunities for the photographer to learn.

Sumner looking towards the Southern Alps

A Mountain and a Car

Another one from the infra-red department - this time a false colour IR picture. This was taken in the field behind our house and, though it is Spring here, I chose blue and orange tones to give an almost Autumn look. False colour IR can often look a bit bland but I'm quite pleased with the way this one turned out with a range of colours and tones - a change from the usual B&W IR anyway.

Mt. Oxford - false colour IR, Canon A590IS

Over two months since the last post, so I'll try to do a little better next time. But to catch up, two weeks ago was the annual "Spring into Oxford" fair, which has grown steadily over the last few years. This year there were about 250 cars on show including this lovely red BMW Isetta 300 - almost exactly the same as my first car - right down to the colour. Though, from memory, I think mine had a conventional chrome bumper running side to side.

BMW Isetta 300

How many people can you get in one of these and still drive? Well, I think it managed five - three across the bench and another two on the parcel shelf with their heads sticking through the roof - those were the days...

Rainbow in infra-red

Most usually, when processing infra-red photographs, they are converted to black and white; basically because infra-red doesn't have any colour that we can see. In black and white, white means lots of infra-red, and black means little or none - it's a convenient representation of something we can't actually see.

However, our cameras have sensors that capture light in three channels; red, green and blue. Even values of infra-red radiation get captured in these three channels though infra-red wavelengths have very little red and no green or blue at all. So, when we process an infra-red picture, it is still made up of red, green and blue data and, if we produce a picture from these three channels of data, it is usually known as a 'false colour infra-red' - which can look quite unnatural; hence why black and white is often favoured.

However, when a rainbow appeared today, I wondered how it would show up if photographed in infra-red and the colour channels were retained. So, because every man woman and child in the world are dying to know the answer to this question, here it is:

Rainbow over Oxford - false colour infra-red photograph

3 out of 3

Our third and last geocache on this sunny winter afternoon found us at the start of the Lees Valley Road. A smart walk uphill (goodness, I made it!) and Bethany found the little capsule hidden behind a large rock.

Fortunately, I had 'Irene' (the InfraRed Canon A590) in my pocket, as I felt that the play of light and shade on the folded hills would come out well in the IR spectrum which, I think, it did.

Canon A590 IR, 1/80 sec, f7.5, ISO 80, 60mm efl.

No, the white isn't snow; just the tussock reflecting the IR. So, with the light and the temperature both fading fast, we decided not to venture further along the road but headed home to light the fire and settle down with a warm cup of tea.

Infra-red (IR) revisited

The last time I tried Infra-red (IR) photography I was using a Nikon D80 and the results were not very good. Exposure times were around 30 seconds and the lenses in my kit at that time didn't play nice with IR and made all sorts of 'hot spots' in the picture. The post processing tools I had available were also not very flexible.

Fast forward a couple of years and I realised that I hadn't tried IR with the D600, current lenses and processing tools. I didn't have high expectations, but was delighted with what I found:

Nikon D600, Nikkor 18-35mm D* lens, Cokin 720nm IR filter, 3sec, f8, ISO800. Processed in Lightroom and Photoshop CC.

Notice the white dot (center top)? That's a daytime moon, mid-day with lots of sun - only with IR. So, all in all and for an unconverted, non-IR camera, the D600 does a pretty good job and the 18-35 D makes a reasonable IR lens (it even has the focus adjustment marks for IR).

Note: I have no idea how the latest 18-35mm *G* lens performs - it is totally different from the *D* being used here and has no IR markings.