Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“…Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” ―
The scope and style of travel photography is constantly changing. Once it was just enough to be somewhere interesting and make a nice photograph, then you needed to be able to deliver that image in color, and nowadays you should also be able to capture an impression of that place. And now, I’d like to add another tool to your travel toolkit— infrared photography.
La Capilla de la Paz
There’s nothing new about black and white travel photography but adding an infrared capture option lets you capture some of your next travel images using invisible light.
When shooting IR images you need to forget everything you know about the best time of day to capture images. To give foliage that famed infrared glow you need to shoot at the time of day when there’s more sun in the scene; this puts you shooting at mid-day which are the “golden hours” for infrared photography. If you need a rule of thumb, try this Farace’s Law: The best time of day to shoot IR is when the worst time of day to shoot normal images. So instead of being sitting in your hotel at noon drinking mai tai’s with the option of making color photographs under boring, harsh lighting, shoot some infrared images instead!
How I Made this Shot: La Capilla de la Paz (Chapel of Peace) overlooks the southern end of Acapulco Bay and is the highest point in the city of Acapulco and is a magical place to visit and even more so to capture in infrared photography using the Wood Effect. This effect is a commonly produced when photographing deciduous trees and grass (in infrared) because they reflect the sun’s infrared energy instead of absorbing it. And palm trees look downright magical in infrared.
Sometimes, I have to violate my own rules. This image that made on the grounds of La Capilla de la Paz was shot around 9:00 AM but sometimes you have to shoot with what’s in front of you and I made a number of images while there. They may not have been the most primo infrared images but at least I had a chance to make them.
The above image, that I call Las puertas nacaradas for obvious reasons, was photographed using a Canon EOS D60 that was converted to IR-only capture by a company no longer in business using their 720nm filter with a Tamron 11-18mm f/4.5-5.6 Di-II SP LD Aspherical lens at 17mm. The exposure was 1/60 sec at f/9.5 an ISO 400.
The original RAW file was opened in Adobe Camera RAW and then processed in Silver Efex and finished using the Glamour Glow filter found in Color Efex to give the warm, soft, heavenly look.
I’ve found that Life Pixel does a great job with IR conversions and they’ve done some 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 available from Amazon starting around nine bucks as I write this. My book Creative Digital Monochrome Effects has a chapter on IR photography and is available new from Amazon for $11.46 with used copies starting around six bucks as I write this.