Working my way back to where I left off writing the blog, back in August (yes, this year)... I joined a workshop group in Badlands National Park (South Dakota) the second week in September. We had mostly bald blue skies, daytime temperatures constantly over 90F, and smoke from the wildfires in Custer State Park that eventually made its way to us the last couple of days...
I love learning, expanding my toolbox, in all areas of my life besides photography. It’s been a summer of just that. Here in New Jersey (USA), due to the close proximity of the Gulf Stream off the coast, the summers are tropical in nature — hot and humid — with afternoon thunderstorms that leave the atmosphere still humid but take the edge off the heat. This summer has been no different which means I hibernate indoors from mid-June until September 1, only venturing out on those days that our dear Canadian friends send us cold fronts so that we can shut off the air conditioning and open the windows for a couple days.
Since the beginning of the year, I have received several emails from shooters who want to convert older camera bodies to infrared. They all want to shoot only for black/white so the 590nm conversion is not of interest to them. I was honored they asked my opinion about which nanometer conversion they should choose, but the decision lies in the personal preference of the shooter.So here are my thoughts and experiences with the 720nm vs 830nm conundrum.
Winter has arrived early in these parts of northwest New Jersey. This week we had an Arctic cold front that kept me inside as much as possible and this morning it is snowing. In preparation for an upcoming juried exhibit, I was working hard at birthing new work: a still-life, non-infrared technique that I’ve been wanting to find time to bring to fruition. With the mission accomplished and the image emailed to be considered for a February photography exhibit, I still had fresh flowers in the house.
When you start down the rabbit hole of IR, you will quickly discover a couple things: not all your lenses will work as you think they should (some create dead-center fuzzy Q-Tips called hot spots), your auto-focus may not be accurate, your exposures might need to be one, two or even three stops overexposed by your light meter reading to get a proper histogram, and visible light colors render differently than what you might expect from a color image that gets converted to a black and white.
I will admit it. I have shiny-pebble-on-the-beach syndrome. Not ashamed to currently admit that pebble is infrared photography. However, it does not mean that I have forsaken my visible light (color) camera.I was hoping that shooting in IR (infrared) would help me to "see" shape, lines, and texture better and perhaps improve my color work. Instead of simplifying my creative thought process, my mind is like a rodent on crack with choices: infrared, color, lens, macro...I set all my cameras to shoot in JPG and RAW (generating two files with every press of the shutter).