Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Trains are wonderful…. To travel by train is to see nature and human beings, towns and churches and rivers, in fact, to see life.—Agatha Christie
When I was testing the Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens, I took it to one of my favorite places, the Colorado Railroad Museum, along with two Canon DSLR bodies. The cameras were an EOS 5D Mark I along with an EOS 50D that had been converted to infrared capture by LifePixel.using their Standard IR (720nm) infrared filter. The Colorado Railroad Museum is a non-profit railroad museum that’s located on 15 acres at a point where Clear Creek flows between North and South Table Mountains in Golden, Colorado.
The Tamron lens features four LD (Low Dispersion) glass elements, three molded-glass aspherical elements, one hybrid aspherical element, one XR (Extra Refractive Index) glass element, an element of UXR (Ultra-Extra Refractive Index) glass with a higher refractive index than XR and a partridge in a pear tree. Tamron’s 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens lives up to the company’s reputation for producing Swiss Army Knife lenses that are sharp as well as versatile.
How I made this photograph: This was one of the infrared images that I made with the Canon EOS 50D. On a camera with an APS-C sized sensor, like the EOS 50D, this Tamron lens has the same angle-of-view as a 45-480mm lens. Exposure for this shot was 1/50 sec at f/16 and ISO 400 with a plus two-thirds stop exposure compensation. After processing in Silver Efex Pro, the RAW file was platinum toned using PhotoKit 2 giving the photograph an appropriate “old timey” look.
I’ve found that Life Pixel does a great job with IR conversions and they’ve 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.
Used copies of my book, The Complete Guide to Digital Infrared Photography are currently available new from Amazon for $33.66 or used copies for less than four bucks, as I write this. Creative Digital Monochrome Effects has a chapter on IR photography and new copies are available from Amazon for $16.16 with used copies starting at less than three bucks, which is a heckuva deal.