It’s National Common Courtesy Day. It’s a day that serves as a reminder of the behavior that keeps society from melting into a sea of madness. The day also brings awareness to how crucial common courtesy is in our lives. So, let’s us all be nice to one another today/
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ―
Spring—or the vernal equinox—began yesterday and the amount of sunshine we (hopefully) saw was approximately 12 hours long. The amount of sunlight will incrementally increase until the first day of Summer on June 20th.
Although Spring may already have sprung where you live, real Spring in Colorado seems to be around the corner… or not. For me that means it won’t be long until I’ll be able to shoot more infrared photography, although I’ve been playing around with the genre a little this winter. This year, I really want to shoot infrared film. I have an expired roll of the original Kodak IR film plus a fresh roll of Rollei Infrared 400 film in my refrigerator just waiting for the leaves to burst into life.
Atmospheric Conditions?
Peak infrared photography season typically ranges from May through September but the weather in Colorado can change so fast that sometimes that window of opportunity can shrink or expand. The best time of day to make infrared images seems to be around noon and I take that to mean standard time, not Daylight Savings Time. In the summer I try to shoot between noon and 1:00PM Mountain Daylight time, if I can. I consider this to be the Golden Hour for infrared photography but sometime I just feel like shooting infrared, regardless of the time and just do it.
Tip: Don’t confuse thermal infrared with photographic infrared. My pal Barry Staver and I did two different PhotoWalks at Hudson Gardens at two different times of year. One was done with temperatures in the high nineties F (around 35 C) and another during cooler weather. I don’t think the images from either shoot looked better or worse regardless of the temps but I sure felt better shooting in the cooler weather,
How I Made this Photo: The above image was made at McCabe Meadows located near Parker Colorado and was shot using a Panasonic Lumix G5 with Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens (at 24mm.) The camera had Life Pixel’s Standard IR (720nm) filter IR conversion. The Av exposure was 1/200 sec sec at f/14 and ISO 400. The Image was captured as a RAW file, then converted to monochrome with Silver Efex using its Full Dynamic Range (harsh) preset.
Next I used Photoshop’s Dodging tool to lighten the branches hanging down at right, then used PhotoKit’s Burn presets to darken one-half of the left side of the image before toning it all with Photo Kit’s Platinum toning filter to give it a more “woody” look. Finally the Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex was applied to another layer to add an infrared glow” to the final photograph.
These days. I shoot all of my infrared images in RAW+JPEG but not all of my camera’s RAW files will open in the copy of Adobe Camera RAW that’s part of my (non-subscription) Photoshop CS6. Sometimes I have to convert newer camera’s RAW files into DNG format with Adobe’s free Digital Negative Converter software. With these cameras I have to use the latest version of Digital Negative Converter but it won’t run on my 27-inch 5K iMac. I installed the latest version of this free program on a 21.5-inch iMac where it will run. This is a workaround I have to use because of my “old” computers and software.
Life Pixel does a great job with IR conversions and they have done all of conversions for my Canon DSLRs as well as 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 available from Amazon for around $19.00 as I write this. My book Creative Digital Monochrome Effects has a chapter on IR photography and is available new from Amazon for $16.16 with used copies starting around seven bucks