I think I mentioned last year that I might convert my old 40D to infrared when I bought my new camera. But then somebody wanted to buy the 40D and I had to decide between making money on it, or spend money on it. Kind of a no-brainer! But I was still interested in infrared, so I got myself an IR filter instead. It has been a long wait for spring and foliage so I could use the filter, because what I am mostly interested in is the way you can use the filter to turn the greens into white to create this spooky atmosphere in the picture.

It turned out that using the filter is a lot harder than I anticipated, and what I mean by that is the post-processing. Taking the picture is not so dramatically different, all you need to do is to compose and focus the picture without the filter, and then add it and use a very long exposure to take the picture. It’s like shooting through the lens cap, you can completely forget looking through the viewfinder, it’s pitch black there. Live preview works, but the picture is completely red and lacks contrast so I’ve gave up with it pretty quickly.

As with the live preview, the resulting picture is red. I mean, completely red – there’s absolutely no other colour it in, just hues of red. Cue a lot of post-processing. After a lot of googling and experimenting, I finally got something that is at least in the ballpark of my expectations. All the IR pictures I’ve seen on the net are way cooler… and no matter which tutorial I looked at, nothing gave me similar results. Experiment is the word. The easy way of processing IR pictures is to make them monochrome, but if I want monochrome pictures then I can just convert my normal colour pictures. Ergo, experiment some more. For every landscape picture I take, I will take one version with the IR filter and see what I get out of it. So far I’ve learned that sunlight makes all the difference, in fact, I can finally make use of the harsh noon light!