Today’s Post by Joe Farace
What happened on Day 1 with my Lumix GX1 that had Life Pixel’s Hyper Color infrared conversion? I took the camera to the giant jacks and ball sculptures at Parker CO’s library and immediately began to doubt my choice of camera. The glare on the GX1’s fixed screen was so bad that it was difficult to shoot any composition that I liked.
Then there was dealing with one of LifePixel’s Hyper Color filter’s main features: LifePixel suggests using your-in camera’s white balance settings (“even Kelvin”) to get a variety of tones into your images. Bouncing in an out of the White Balance menu turned out to be a pain in the patootie, so I needed a solution for that too.
Problems Solved
Both problems were solved: I borrowed the Panasonic DMW-LVF2 tilting electronic viewfinder from my unmodified black-bodied GX1 and slipped it onto the (silver) modified GX1’s shoe and was set to go. If you don’t already own an LVF2, I’ve seen them on eBay for around $150, which I agree is too much money for what you get. Maybe when my ships comes in, I’ll purchase a second one or maybe not.
Switching white balance was easier. The GX1, like many mirrorless cameras, has custom settings on the Mode dial allowing each one to customized to fit a specific shooting mode. With some testing. I found there were really only three White Balance settings that produced dramatically different colors and set up the C1 and C2 modes accordingly. For the third, I made it the default setting when shooting in any of the GX1’s standard modes. (I typically shoot Infrared in Av.) Creating these custom settings is simple; it’s all in your manual and takes mere seconds to set up. More importantly switching white balance modes was now just a dial spin, no menu diving required.
Day 2 PLUS
The above image was made during my PhotoWalk in Hudson Gardens last year with my pal Barry Staver. It was made using the Panasonic Lumix GX1 and Lumix G Vario 12-32mm f/3.5-5.6 lens (at 12mm) with an exposure of 1/400 sec at f/16 and ISO 400.
The RAW file was processed using some of the techniques covered in my post, Is white balance important in infrared photography? before applying an optional Photoshop action (Hyper to Super Color) that Life Pixel sometimes offers with conversions, at least they did when I had my GX1 converted. For similar but different results, you could also use the techniques I describe in my post How to Produce the Blue Sky Infrared Technique. The final touch was the additon of the Glamour Glow filter that’s Part of the Color Efex plug-in.
I’ve found that Life Pixel does a great job with IR conversions and they’ve done most of the conversions for some of my Canon DSLRs and all of my Panasonic Lumix G-series cameras. This is not a paid or sponsored endorsement, just my experience.
My book, The Complete Guide to Digital Infrared Photography is available from Amazon with new copies available for $14.16 and used copies starting for around three bucks as I write this. Creative Digital Monochrome Effects has a chapter on IR photography and is available from Amazon new for $12.19 with used copies starting for less than two bucks.