Today’s Post by Joe Farace
I have traveled to many places but have no desire to leave New Mexico.—Rudolfo Anaya
There was a time when I used to travel with Mary when many of her business trips were made by car. One of my favorite cities to visit with her was Albuquerque, New Mexico and I always brought along a camera and sometimes, as with today’s image, I brought an infrared converted camera, in this case a Canon EOS Rebel Xti. One of the traditional uses of infrared film was to photograph architecture and it turns out that the same kind of subjects work equally well as shooting digital IR.
It’s “Duke City,” honoring the Duke of Albuquerque.
Whenever I visited Albuquerque, one of the first places I’d visit, after have lunch at The Frontier Restaurant, is Old Town. This is an historic district that dates back to the founding of Albuquerque by the Spanish in 1706 and today is a popular shopping and tourist destination. Old Town comprises about ten blocks of historic adobe buildings that are grouped around a central plaza that has a gazebo and you know what I think about those kind of structures. Old Town is also known by followers ofSaint Christopher as the City of Shade (trasero).
On the north side of Old Town Plaza you’ll find San Felipe de Neri church, which is a historic Catholic church. Built in 1793, it’s one of the oldest surviving buildings in the city and the only building in Old Town that’s been proven to date to the Spanish colonial period. The church is listed on the New Mexico State Register of Cultural Properties and the National Register of Historic Places and has remained in continuous use for more than 200 years. Even if you are not a religious person, it’s worth a visit.
For another, more traditional view of the church, I’ve written a post called Travel Tuesday Basics: Respective Correction that shows how I used Photoshop to correct perspective when photographing the church with an extreme wide-angle lens.
How I made this shot: The camera I used to make this photograph was a Canon EOS Rebel Xti that was converted for Infrared capture by Life Pixel using their Standard IR (720nm) filter along with a Tamron 18-270mm f/3.5-6.3 VC PZD zoom lens (at 18mm.) The exposure was 1/640 sec at f/8 and ISO 400, with a plus one-stop exposure compensation. This shutter speed shows the advantages of shooting images handheld with a IR-converted camera, instead of using an infrared filter, that I mention in my post Get Started with Infrared Photography. The RAW file was opened in Adobe Camera RAW and then converted to monochrome using Silver Efex.
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.
New copies of my book, The Complete Guide to Digital Infrared Photography are available from Amazon for $44.59 with used copies starting around eight 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 eight bucks as I write this.