Today’s Post by Joe Farace
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.— Marcus Tullius Cicero
A while ago I had my Panasonic Lumix G6 mirrorless camera converted for infrared photography by LifePixel using their “Enhanced Color IR Filter.” For those of you interested in the details, it’s equivalent to a 665nm infrared filter and allows more natural color light to pass through your lens onto the sensor.
LifePixel claims that this conversion is well suited for color IR photography with more saturation and color range. They also say that the black and white infrared effect “looks quite good although with a bit less contrast” and a little less contrast is a good thing for IR photography and, when converted into monochrome, this filter does produce excellent black and white images. But that’s not just why I think that this conversion is so cool.
With cameras converted with the “Enhanced Color IR Filter” you can use Photoshop’s Channel Mixer Adjustment Layers to create something that’s black and white while producing the “blue sky” effect, producing an image that blends color and monochrome as well as reality and unreality at the same time. But that’s not what I did here, although I did start by converting the images to produce that “blue sky” look at the beginning of processing but then..
How I made this shot: This photograph was made during a PhotoWalk at Littleton, Colorado’s Hudson Gardens when my friend and legendary photojournalist Barry Staver had a bit of an infrared PhotoWalk.The property is composed of thirty acres of garden exhibits, trails, natural terrain and event venues and was opened to the public in June 1996
The above photograph was shot using an Lumix G6 with G Vario 12-32mm f/3.5-5.6 ASPH lens (at 17mm) with an exposure of 1/250 sec at f/16 and ISO 400. The as-captured RAW file is shown at above right. That image file can be converted using the “blue sky” effect that’s described in How to Produce the Blue Sky Infrared Technique. Or you can apply an optional Photoshop action (IR Channel Swap w/ white foliage) that Life Pixel offers with conversions. This is what I began my processing with but the image looked too much like some of the other infrared images that I created during this PhotoWalk. So as a finishing touch I applied the Detail Extractor filter from Color Efex Pro to give it a different look from some of the other IR images that I made that day,
Life Pixel does a great job with IR conversions and they have done most of the conversions for my Canon DSLRs and all of my Panasonic Lumix G-series cameras. This is not a paid or sponsored endorsement, just my experience.
My book, The Complete Guide to Digital Infrared Photography is available from Amazon with new copies available for $27.79 and used copies starting around seven bucks, as I write this. Creative Digital Monochrome Effects has a chapter on IR photography and is available from Amazon with new copies for $13.04 and used copies selling for around $2, less than the price of a Starbucks latte.