Tuesday Tips & Pics - Shooting Infrared

I'm so sorry, I've been a bad blogger lately! I've been so busy and gotten so behind on taking a pictures let alone editing them! I promise I'll get back into the swing of things!

I had a bit of inspiration today and got to go shoot a bit of infrared photography.  Infrared photography allows you to photograph infrared light that your naked eye can't see.  In color it looks very red and strange, but when converted to black and white it creates a very cool and surreal effect.

There are only two ways (that I know of!) to shoot in infrared.  You can send your camera out to get converted to permanently shoot in infrared or you can buy a filter, like the Hoya 58mm RM-72 Infrared Filter to put over your lens.  I REALLY want one of these filters! I know the disadvantage of it is that it cuts out a LOT of light so you have to use it with a tripod and a long exposure.  But it beats permanently converting your camera to shoot infrared!

However, I was talking to a friend at work that found a Canon PowerShot G9  online used for fairly cheap and bought it just so he could send it out and have it converted to Infrared.  He chose this camera because it was cheap and portable and still shot RAW.  So, he was kind enough to let me borrow it for the evening, so I went to a park and grabbed some shots real quick!

Here are a couple of the shots I got:

When uploaded, these pictures looked bright red. The first thing I did was adjust the white balance to bring some of the red under control. Even though the final picture will be black and white, white balance will still effect the end result. After fixing the white balance (a bit, it still looks strange) I converted to black and white and adjusted blacks, contrast, exposure, and clarity a bit. I did those steps in lightroom, then I brought the photo into Photoshop, duplicated the layer and added a gaussian blur at 25 and then set the blending mode to soft light. I lowered the effect to 30-50% depending on the photo.

Here's what the process looked like:

 

Link up your shots (and tips if you have one!) below!