Beyond Vision

Earlier this night, I decided to not use this image for the blog. It's not that bad, but there is a lot of information being lost threw editing and what not, and I thought it could be better. However, after I went out and did some more shooting, I took another look and decided that it might actually make a good blog post.

I won't say much about infrared photography, because I really don't know that much. What I do know is that filters in front of your sensor filter out infrared light and only let visible light pass through. In order to shoot infrared, you can have those filters removed and replaced, or you can put a filter on your lens that blocks visible light and lets infrared light in. The latter method is what I used today, with some very interesting results.

Cameras are sensitive only up to about 1500nm wave lengths, so they are by no means thermal imagers. It's a much different look, and I really have no way of explaining it because I don't know much about it. Objects reflect infrared light differently than visible light, so results are very odd.

Tonight, I shot a beach with a sunset, and wow it was not what I expected. The water turned into a velvet mist, which you'd expect from a long exposure, but it stops there. The colors were, well, not colors actually, but everything was a shade of red, and the sky was yellow. No idea why....

With the filter, I had to shoot at 30s, f/8, and ISO100 to get a good exposure. It's a really dense filter.

The sky was a little blown out, but some how with the infrared it wasn't that bad. The color was the big problem. To fix this, I used Adobes DNG profile editor to make a custom color profile for that image. In it, I adjusted my white balance to how I wanted it, and also the hue/saturation of each color. However, those latter adjustments didn't do what you'd expect. They actually adjusted the brightness of the different areas based on the colors the camera thinks it saw.

Once I had my color profile made, I went back into Lr and further adjusted the white balance since it still wasn't quite right. I let Lr do that, I just picked a fairly neutral rock and let Lr do the balancing. Not too bad. To finish it off, I did a gradient adjustment to the sky to darken it a bit since it was overexposed. Also, I did a lens correction to get rid of massive barrel aberration.

See you tomorrow!