Landscape photography is a fascinating discipline where you can experiment with a lot of techniques. You can choose to compose your pictures horizontally, vertically or go for a panorama. But with a tripod and few creative filters, new dimensions can be added to the scene, and produce something which can be quite far from the reality.
The scene in question was a metallic waterer standing in a fresh field of grass. It was a cloudy day with some sunshine and a strong wind which is plenty to play with.
As an exercise, I took a series of pictures from the same spot (give or take few meters) using a Canon powershot G9 and the following accessories: tripod, neutral density filter Hoya ND400, infrared filter Hoya R72, circular polarizing filter. Processing was done with Adobe photoshop CS3, Lightroom 2 and Photomatix. Please click on the pictures to see a larger version.
Photo 4: long exposure (15 seconds, ND400 neutral density filter + G9 internal ND filter on)
Photo 5: long exposure (6 seconds, ND400 neutral density filter)
Photo 6: long exposure infrared (8 seconds, R72 infrared filter)
Photo 7: long exposure infrared (1 second, R72 infrared filter)
Photo number 4 is my favorite because it depicts the best this windy day of spring but I like also the alternate reality of number 7. These pictures are not very stock oriented, however it will interesting to follow them to see which ones get the most downloads.....
I've been experimenting lately with infrared photography as I did previously with HDRand see if eventually such pictures are accepted and sold on the main microstock agencies.
How does it works ?
Light is an electomagnetic radiation with visible light made of wavelenghts in the 400-700 nm and infrared light in 700-1200 nm range (near infrared). Longer wavelenghts will fall in the range of mid-infrared and far infrared (used in thermal imagery) just before the microwaves.
The IR filter placed on top of the lens blocks most of the visible light and let near infrared hit the CCD. Unfortunalely, IR sensitivity is decreased quite a lot by the hot mirror placed on top of the CCD sensor which job is to protect it :(
Why infrared photography ?
Mainly because it gives a dramatic, surreal effect to the pictures. Foliage and grass have the property to reflect infrared radiations and appear much brighter in IR giving an ethereal white glow (in some pictures grass can be mistaken with snow). Different foliages have different IR reflectance as well as foliage affected by disease or insect infestation. Blue sky and water will appeardark. Shadows can be interesting in IR with more subtle nuances. Depending on the light, textures can be revealed in more details as well. Skin also can give interesting tones.
Challenges in IR photography
Focusing and depth of field
In IR, focusing is different than in visible so producing sharp images can be tricky. If you are lucky your lens have a IR focus mark on it. If not the technique is to take several shots at different focus distance preferably with a small aperture. An universal technique is to use the hyperfocale distance but once again you will have to experiment before to found the settings for your camera.
Exposure
Because the IRfilter is very dark, indications given by the camera cannot be trusted and most of time several seconds exposure are needed. I used typically 2 to 15 seconds exposure time so a tripod is necessary. On the positive side, long exposure can give interesting results on water and clouds for example.
Equipment
You will get variable results with IR photography as it depend to what extent your CCD sensor is IR sensitive: most manufacturers add a IRblocking filter (also called hot mirror)in front of the CCD ! It looks like that few year back the protection was not so high…..
Also it depends on the lens : some lenses are known to cause flares or hotspots in the pictures making them not usuable at all….
My gear
I am pleased with the Canon Powershot G9 so far using a Hoya R72 filter onthe 58 mm Lensmate lens adapter. To obtain longer exposures, I select the ND function on (3stops) and/or put a ND4 filter (2 stops) on top of the R72.
As its name suggests, the Hoya filter blocks wavelenghts below 720 nm. The cut-off actually follows a curve a 50% is blocked at 720 nm so the filter let pass through a tiny amountof visible wavelenghts.
Although quite expensive, a lot of digital cameras can be modified to remove the IR filter in front of the CCD and make it possible to take handheld IR pictures.
10 steps workfow
Here is my workflow using Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom started with the raw file. It tend not go for the usual B&W processing to keep some blue sky.
Open Raw with LR2
Set color temperature 2000, tint -50
Remove noise Luminance 60
Chromatic aberration : all edges
Export as jpeg or tiff
In CS3 swap red and blue channels: red 0 blue 100, blue 0, red 100
Image--> adjustements levels blue and green
Image ---> curves define gray point
Import in LR2 adjust hue/saturation on the different channels to get the desired results.
Export as jpeg
Microstock and IR photography
Although not popular, IR pictures can be found in most agencies. As the time of writing, a search with ''infrared landscape'' and ''infrared buiding'' as keywords returned 545 and 117 pictures on Shutterstock respectively.Very similar search came up on Dreamstime with 537 and 128 images. Istockphoto is very pickup about IR pictures: ony 137 hits returned for ''infrared landscape'' and 45 for ''infrared building’’ !
The most challenging is to have IR pictures accepted as they tend to be noisier and less sharp and downsizing from 12 to 5 MP can help the picture to pass the inspection.
Despite a high rejection rate, I managed to have some IR pictures accepted at Shutterstock (29), Dreamstime (31), Fotolia (9), 123RF(46). However it seems quite impossible to get those kind of pictures accepted at IS which is reflected by the low amount of IR picture on their database.
As far as sales concerned, two of my IR pictures are in my 10 most popular pictures at SS, I had 9 sales so far on DT but 0 on Fotolia.
IR can be combined with HDR or panoramic stitching to produced spectacular pictures but of course noise has to be kept low somehow. Here is one example below:
