Monochrome Monday: It’s Not Snow; It’s Infrared.

by | Nov 27, 2023

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

As I write this Alexa tells me that there is a 55% chance of snow today. (it snowed this past Friday) But maybe, as in the image below, it’s not snow but infrared

Today’s featured infrared image was made in Arvada, Colorado on the grounds of the Arvada Center for the Performing Arts, a multi-use cultural facility that opened in 1976 and is operated by the City of Arvada .

The Arvada Center consists of the Arvada History Museum, three theaters, art galleries, music, dance, and theater rehearsal rooms, classrooms, a conference center and an amphitheater.

For a long time, the Center’s large parking lot was home to one of the biggest charity car shows in the Rocky Mountain West, the Hot Times Kool Cars Show that supported the Children’s Hospital burn unit. That all came to a screeching halt when management changes at the Center decided otherwise. Now the show is but a fleeting memory but once upon a time, I entered my 1953 Packard Clipper in the show and while I didn’t win any prizes it was the most fun car show that I ever entered, no matter the car I brought.

How I made this photograph: Evergreens, like this blue spruce in the above photograph, have an unpredictable but decidedly less intense response to infrared capture, one that’s far different from how deciduous trees appear in these kinds of photography. The above photograph was captured with a Canon EOS 50D that was converted to IR-only use by LifePixel using their Standard IR (720nm) filter. A Tamron AF18-200mm XR Di lens set at 18mm was used along with a handheld exposure of 1/100 sec at f/16 at ISO 400. The RAW file was converted to monochrome using Silver Efex and the final image was Platinum toned using PhotoKit 2.