I finally took the plunge and had one of my older cameras professionally converted to infrared. And I’m very pleased with the results. Since 99.9% of my work is done in black & white, I opted for the deep, black & white IR conversion – equivalent to an 830 nm filter.
With this conversion, images are captured as BW infrared straight out of the camera, so there is no need for post editing unless I want to fine tune the BW look. The whites are punchy and clean; the shadows are rich and deep. Up to now I’ve been using a Hoya R72 filter which has many limitations. For one thing, the R72 can’t be used during windy conditions as foliage will blur because of the longer exposures needed to record images. With the newly converted camera, I can eliminate blur on a windy day by simply boosting the shutter speed and no tripod is needed. In post production, there is no more fussing around trying to calibrate colour balance and/or swapping channels in Photoshop or Lightroom. I merely compose the shot, set the exposure and – voila – a black and white infrared image. Here are a couple of test shots I took today.
With this conversion, images are captured as BW infrared straight out of the camera, so there is no need for post editing unless I want to fine tune the BW look. The whites are punchy and clean; the shadows are rich and deep. Up to now I’ve been using a Hoya R72 filter which has many limitations. For one thing, the R72 can’t be used during windy conditions as foliage will blur because of the longer exposures needed to record images. With the newly converted camera, I can eliminate blur on a windy day by simply boosting the shutter speed and no tripod is needed. In post production, there is no more fussing around trying to calibrate colour balance and/or swapping channels in Photoshop or Lightroom. I merely compose the shot, set the exposure and – voila – a black and white infrared image. Here are a couple of test shots I took today.
