infra-red

A while back, and on a complete whim, I bought an infra-red filter to screw onto the front of one of my lenses.  I put it in a drawer and forgot about it.  

Until that is this summer which, up until the school holidays started obviously, was fiercely hot and sunny.  Far from ideal conditions for landscape photography.  But perfect, so I had read, for infra-red type work.

So, I headed out with my filter to try it out.

It’s not an easy filter to use.  It’s so dark it cuts out around 10 stops of light, so you have to apply the skills learned from long exposure photography (pre-focussing, calculating exposure times, hoping…) to get a well exposed image.  And then there’s all the post processing work in Lightroom and Photoshop to convert the raw infra-red image into something approaching art.

Is it worth it?  I’m not so sure, so I think I’ll be selling my filter.  It’s just not for me.

And we rarely get long, hot summers anyway!

raw image:

Fujifilm X-T2, Fujinon 10-24 f4.0 at 14mm
12 seconds at f8.0, ISO 100
tripod, remote shutter release

 processed image: