South of Market in Infrared

[David]

For A few months I've been trying to get my K-7 to capture IR photographs. So far, the results have been middling at best. Different settings have no solved the issues either. Last night I had an idea, though, to set the camera in monochrome and try again. A few shots turned out well enough to share.

On my K-7 I had my 28mm Focal (M42) and a Massa IR 720 filter. This allowed me to use live view and simply switch the lens between auto and manual to allow enough light in for the sensor.


Here is AT&T Park from the draw bridge next to it out to the San Francisco Bay in the east. This was stitched together from 15 or so portrait-oriented shots. The vertical lines on the right side are glare bouncing between the IR filter and lens. This could have been avoided by using a shade, which I didn't have this afternoon. f16, each shot was 20 seconds. The nice thing about these long exposures is that all the joggers and walkers and such weren't picked up on the film. This resulted, I think, in a fairly eerie look devoid of people and cars.


This is the main entrance for AT&T Park, near the Willie Mays corner. This is just a single shot taken at 30 seconds, I think, f11.


Easily my favorite shot of the day, the 'ghosts' are one hobo who was trying to get the trolley to run him over and an oldster who was walking slowly up the ramp. Normally, no one ever asks why I have my camera out. During the 30 seconds for this exposure, three people asked about my camera. All asked what I was photographing, to which I gave my stock answer "oh, just learning how to use it." One person asked how many megapixels it had, to which I responded, to my pleasure, with "not enough." Mostly, a guy with a nice camera and a nice tripod scream "VICTIM" almost anywhere, so I do my best to downplay my gear. This was also a 30-second exposure but at f16.

I tried a few shots wide open at f2.8 and a few at f8. None were super spectacular nor did they really show anything more interesting than these. Of note, it was a somewhat hazy day over the bay today but the IR shots cut through most of that, indicating the haze was mostly light pollution.

Now that I managed the fundamentals, the next step is to figure out how to add false colors. In short, though, I'm fairly pleased with these results.

[Bob]

Very good. IR is fun to play with.

[IAZA]

very nice! I like it
can you share the camera setting?

[Sven]

Great series!
Water, foilage and cirrus clouds are perfect ingridients in IR photograpphy.
The car and people filtering effect of long exposure is another thing to play around with. I have converted my D100 and it's as IR sensitive as it was in visual, so I don't get that effect.

[David]

Hey, Iaza,

Here are the settings I think are pertinent:

1- white balance: auto (though other WB settings could provide interesting results in color.)
2- color setting: monochrome

I'm still working on a combination that looks good in color. And, of course, you need an IR filter.

Sven, you could still take long-exposure shots, just like with non-IR shots. Load up on ND 8 or 16 filters. I'm curious as to if an IR filter would sufficiently cut IR light to slow your exposure. I suspect not.

[Sven]