look what i can grow! mushrooms, the american and british variety. so many nerds here.....i'm glad you still have photo threads for me!
This is a sunset, about 750 miles off the US east coast, about halfway between Bermuda and St Maarten. Partial color filter, orange.
Some shots from my recent canoeing trip: Spoiler Paddling along the border... United States on the left, Canada on the right. My dad and brother on an early morning fishing expedition. I learned garter snakes do in fact swim, and pretty well too. Sumac and maple leaves were vivid. Tucked into the woods were some amazing falls, I could have spent days hanging out here.
Do any of y'all have any experience with digital IR photography? I'm using one of the old Sony's with night shot, (Actually 2 different models- F707 and F828.) I know Sony neutered these things so you can't manually adjust shutter speed and f/stop in night shot, but I've come across a quick, dirty way to override that so that I should be able to have complete control over the settings. Anyways, at lunch today I went down a few floors to where I wouldn't have to shoot through tempered glass and screwed a 950 IR pass filter on the F828. In normal mode the viewfinder was blank, I switched it to night shot and voila! A picture appeared! So I know daylight IR is possible with this camera. I fired off a couple of shots and when I got home tonight I reviewed them on my computer. (Bear in mind, I wasn't concerned about framing a shot or anything other then checking to see if it was capable of daytime IR.) The first thing I noticed is they were very grainy. I'm pretty sure this is due to the default settings of f/2.0 and 1/60. As soon as I can manually override the aperture, I have no doubt I can fix this. Other then the obvious advice of keep playing with it, does anyone have any hints or tricks for IR? Mainly, how the hell do folks get red, purple, blue hues in their IR pictures? I saw photos taken by old SLR's using IR film and IR pass filters long before Photoshop that weren't glorified B&W pictures and I've always wanted to capture that.
Back in the day I used to do film-based IR photography, at night, in the mountains... and it was very, very cool. It always came out as shades of grey though... and my understanding is that the colourization process is an after-effect or post-processing of the IR pic... I've never seen a raw IR pic that was colourized... the various wavelengths are specifically converted to colour. After all, IR is non-visible light wavelengths, therefore you can't see colour out of it... because colour is a totally different segment of the spectrum. Colour IR displays or pics are after the colourization transformation takes place... and if your camera isn't doing it right now, I doubt it has the capability to do it at all. Odds are you might have to dump the pic into Photoshop or something and process it. $0.02 edit: Just did some digging and while colourized infrared film is available, it's crazy hard to find, so not in the realm of mere mortals.
Yeah, this is where I'm getting confused. I know many of the digital IR pics I see are taken with an R72 filter which passes only IR above 720nm and I'm using a 950nm filter, which obviously passes only 950 and above. The Hoya R72 does have a red hue to it, but red should be color neutral I would think...much like using a red filter for B&W pictures. I dunno. I'm just confused. IR is new to me, photography is not. I've just been away from it for 25 years or so. This is probably a really stupid question and I'm sure I already know the answer, but if I put a blue graduated filter behind an IR pass filter would it actually put a blue color in the image?
I don't have much to add, but I started out with a Sony DSC-H9 that had a built in IR capability. I only messed around with it a few times and found the on board IR light weak so photos typically came out very grainy. However if I used an IR filter on a very bright Surefire flashlight I could eliminate nearly all the grain.
To answer my question that I knew the likely result: Nope. It just got grainier. Even indoors using straight nightshot without the IR pass filter there was no color. I tried a red, blue, green, purple, orange, & yellow graduated filter just to see if any of them would add would add color...and nothing. Looks like I'm going to have to reinstall Photoshop and learn how to actually use it. Son of a bitch.
The reason you're getting so much grain is because the night mode on that Sony jacks the ISO up to 640. On a DSLR that wouldn't be a problem but that's way higher than I was ever comfortable using on that Sony. ISO 400 was even fairly grainy on that camera, I think the base ISO was 50 and I never liked to go over 200. Try putting your IR filter on the camera, not putting it into night shot mode, and resting your camera on a rock or something and taking a long exposure outdoors at f/2. Do you see anything? You'd have to use a tripod to shoot like that, but at least it'd give you creative control over the exposure, which night shot mode does not. That's how most people shoot IR if they don't have an IR-converted camera. Note that no color filter will help here because IR is not in the visible color spectrum.
I'm just waiting to get some magnets I ordered. There's a real quick and dirty way to get the IR cut filter out of the way on the f828 & F717 (So I imagine it'll work on the 707 as well.) Then I will have full manual control. http://www.schweinert.com/blog/files/96 ... 7b-54.html And I think I might have used ISO 400 film once in my SLR and wasn't thrilled with it. I really don't like going over 100.
If you haven't used a DSLR yet, you'll be friggin' astonished in the leaps they've made in high ISO. It's unbelievable.