Infrared Photography II
2014.09.01
Day One Hundred and Ninety Four. Excited by my new infrared filter and the fact that it's a three day weekend, I went out in search of cool stuff to shoot. My first stop was Fort Caroline National Memorial. This place had been on my list for some time, and there's no better reason to finally visit a place than a new filter! The IR filter is really thick. All of the images in this set are 2 minute exposures. For the Fort Caroline images, I tried the channel swap processing technique. I'm not sure how much I like the deep pinks I found. I'm sure there's some Photoshop wizardry I could do to fix the colours to how I like them, but I don't really like editing in Photoshop, so I'm publishing them as is, having learned that I prefer black and white.
Stop number two was Dames Point (the park under the north end of the bridge). There a fishing pier that provides an excellent view of the bridge, provided you have a wide enough lens to capture it. 20mm was just about perfect. This image taught me an extremely important lesson. IR leakage is still a problem, even if you're shooting an IR image (though, at that point, it's probably fair to just call it light leakage). If you look at the underside of the bridge, the bright bit just in front of the nearer uprights isn't lit by light that was present in the scene, but by light leaking through the viewfinder. I originally tried to process this image so you could see all of the detail in the underside of the bridge, but the uneven lighting made that impossible. In the end, I'm not unhappy with the silhouette, but it's not my favourite either.
The final destination for my IR tour was the Southbank Riverwalk, which provides the best view of the downtown skyline. I got super lucky with the extraordinarily epic clouds in this shot. This is definitely my favourite shot of the day!
How do you feel about infrared photography?
