A Little Bit of Infrared Photography

The View from our Front Door (IR 680nm) (Olympus Pen E-P1 - 680nm IR converted, M.Zuiko 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 L ED lens at 14mm, 1/160 sec at f/8, ISO 400, handheld)

Since it was the first day in ages with a bit of blue sky and some cloud, when I had time to try some photography, I thought I would do a bit more experimenting with infrared (IR).  This was done using a 680nm converted Olympus Pen E-P1 camera.  The final result in colour is shown above, the original shot from the camera looked like this one below:

The conversion of this image involves quite a few steps in Lightroom and Photoshop, including setting the white balance to get the correct tones initially, then switching around the RGB channels and fiddling with a range of other settings, curves, etc. to get the correct balance of colours.  The result is interesting and the yellows contrast the blues in the sky nicely.

I also tried converting it to black & white using Nik's Silver Efex Pro III, the result is below:

The classic white effect, reminiscent of snow, is the result of the IR light being emitted from vegetation, particularly the green stuff.  It can provide fantastic contrasty images but does require a fair bit of experimentation, and I need to keep practising - watch my blog for future posts on this subject.