Category Archives: infrared

The Counahans, Mount Street

Mount Street Cemetery

Grave of Bridget (d 1891) and Cornelius (d 1904) Counahan, Mount Street Cemetery in Wellington.   I’m fascinated that for even obscure graves you can find information online that hints at long ago lives.  Cornelius was a baker, who in 1887 was in court, disputing with a former employer who’d failed to pay wages or repay a loan, charged with larceny because he’d seized some kitchen equipment.  The case was dismissed!    Bridget and Cornelius had a daughter Catherine in 1888, so that little girl would have been just a toddler when her mother died, and 16 when she became an orphan.  And then looking for more information . . . another hour vanishes.

Mount Street was the first Catholic cemetery in Wellington, it runs down a steep hillside by the main Victoria University campus in a very scenic cascade of old tombstones.

Photographed with an infrared modifed camera and IRchrome filter, lens was a lensbaby trio28 set to twist.

Feathered models with IRChrome filter

The IR chrome filter seeks to recreate the effect of the olden-times kodachrome film,  spares the blue and turns foliage rich reds and oranges.  Intended for blue skies and such, but also a nice colour effect on blue-feathered birds, and the images don’t need the ‘colour-swap’ processing that most infrared camera images require.

 

Shot on a full-spectrum modified A6000

Genoa at dusk

Genoa harbour

We are enjoying a ridiculous one month whirlwind tour of Italy, savoring the mid-winter no-tourist vibe.  Weather-wise it mostly like pleasant spring weather at home.   Genoa was a one-day stop on the way to Nice, but turned out to be packed with surprises, and it’s been marked as “next time and stay longer” on the imaginary travel planner.

After a busy day wandering through the quite fab aquarium and history of the sea museum my husband, ex-navy and with a marine biology degree was in high degrees of happy place (and okay, I was pretty happy too).  On the way back to our accommodation we happened to pass a former palace now a museum (as you do in Italy),  an hour or so before closing.  The art was excellent, the galleries pleasingly empty, but just as we were about to head down stairs a guard suggested there was just time to take the lift to the roof.   So, amazing unexpected views across the roofs of Genoa, at about 4.45pm.

Lesson for next time: must remember to put the pocket tripod in ones pocket, just in case.

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Baboon processed 2 ways

Baboons, despite being the most evil of all apes, are quite photogenic, with eerily human-like eyes and looks-like-a-smile-but-it’s-not mouths.  Dithering about processing this chap, to colour swap or not?  Either way, I’m glad that viewing glass at the zoo is thick, even though it does make taking photographs harder!

Photographed with the IR modifed camera, and a 590nm filter

Another version of that friendly smile

Bitey ape

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Distracted by baubles

Such a silly, simple camera toy – a small glass ball, costing about $8.  But, great fun to take a photograph or ten through, until the novelty wears off, just as the technique is mastered.  These came out a little differently using the infrared modifed camera as the light doesn’t reflect on surfaces in quite the usual way.  Done with it for now, but I might revisit a few monuments with it, it functions as an extremely wide angle lens, so quite good for the kind of places that you usually can’t quite fit in due to other buildings and such.

Eh, lookee, I won a thing!

Well, I won a part of a bigger thing, the macro segment of The 2018 Sigma D-Photo Amateur Photographer of the Year.  I’ve not won anything like this before, possibly because I’ve timidly not entered any infrared macro photos in any competitions. There’s even a nice prize lens coming my way.

So check this months D-Photo magazine, turn to page 42 and, look, it’s my butterfly, among some other darn fine photos all plucked from the 13,000+ entries in the competition overall this year.

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White Knight

Spring, tralah etc

I spent last weekend in Christchurch, a city justly famous for it’s blossom-tree filled parks.  Thinks look just a little different in the near infrared: branches about to burst with buds are glowing already, and sometimes colours sharply different in daylight aren’t (magnolias for egs, the dark dark purple kind and the white kind, both look the same).

Duck Lake, closeup blossom and a Field of not-golden daffodils, all with the 35mm lightweight macro lens which has become my go-to holiday lens choice.

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The joy of processing!

There are people who proudly proclaim that their photos are all “just as they came out of the camera”.  I am not these people. I am particularly not these people when it comes to working with the IR mod camera.  Images need to be processed or they’d all just be a sad red fog.  Let me show you . . .

ir mod camera processing

Roughly, the processing process here went like this (clockwise from the top left).

  1. The in-camera jpg, which is pretty much what my camera’s viewfinder shows me
  2. The raw file with default settings
  3. Custom camera profile applied and brightness etc adjusted in ACR
  4. Colour channels swapped in Photoshop, tweaking (I like the Nik HDR filter to add some structure, though not tooo much, also playing with the colour balance) and finishing with a high-pass to zing up the fur

One of the aspects I enjoy with this sort of camera (with the sensor that filters out non-visible light removed)  is that as well as all the usual photographic fun of choosing subjects and lenses and apertures and shutter speeds and  all the rest, there’s also a very necessary bunch of extra creative choices to make.

  • Before the photograph: which filter to catch which part of light our eyes can’t quite see naturally
  • After the photograph: all the different processing choices.  So many choices.

Much fun.

Prairie Dog

Part of the joy is the joy of discovery, revealing an interesting or unexpected image hiding in an unprocessed fog.

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