IR Photos of Costa Rica and Shropshire

[jsachs]

I just posted a few IR photos from a recent trip to Costa Rica I took with Scott Setterberg of Colortexture Photo Tours (https://www.colortexturephototours.com/). If you ever want to do landscape photography in Costa Rica, I highly recommend them. Scott lives in Oregon half the year and Costa Rica the rest of the time so he knows the region really well and has a lot of local contacts.

Also posted a few from a trip to Shropshire in November.

Photos available on Vero (@jsachs) or at https://jsachs.photoshelter.com/index

[Marpel]

Don't know if it my system (MacBook Air, OS Monterey), the intro thumbnails for the photo galleries are sharp, but when I click on and open/scroll the images, every one is blurry. Thought they might snap into focus after a bit of a wait, but nope...

[jsachs]

I am just now trying out PhotoShelter.com with a 14-day free subscription -- to check it out go to https://jsachs.photoshelter.com/. Should be a big improvement.

[Marpel]

The new site is MUCH better (and the images are actually in focus).

Couple comments/questions:

Are the infrared first done with an IR camera (or something), then converted to black and white, because many look just like a black and white photo?

My two favourite images are the baked mudflats(?) in the Macro section and the mountain/reflection, water, ice, clouds in Color. Both very good.

[jsachs]

In Costa Rica, I was using a camera with a full spectrum conversion. This involves replacing the cover glass over the sensor with one that does not block IR or UV light. Consequently, to take normal color photos you use a filter that is similar to the cover glass that was removed and to take IR you use a filter that blocks visible and UV light and just lets IR through. I generally use a 720nm IR filter which is transparent to IR and most visible light. The resulting images taken with this filter look very red if you process them normally. If you set the color temperature accordingly, the images are mostly black and white with a little yellowish or blueish tint in different areas. I normally just convert this directly to monochrome and thus the images are black and white. Some other IR filters with a different spectral response will give you more color which yields the other-worldly effect some people seem to like. Personally I prefer rendering IR images as black and white.

For most of the other IR images, I used a camera with a more radical conversion in which they remove the RGB Bayer color filter array from the sensor as well as replacing the cover glass. This yields a truly monochrome camera that can only shoot black and white. Depending on the filter you use you can do conventional black and white using visible light or IR or UV black and white. This type of conversion increases the sensor resolution a little and also makes it more sensitive, but you can no longer use it for normal color photography.

For more info on this, see my document: https://www.dl-c.com//Documents/IR%20Photography.pdf or go to the LifePixel or Kolari web sites.