I’ve not used my infra-red camera for at least a year so it was fun to pull it out today and get reacquainted with it. This was taken at my in-laws’ in El Dorado, just outside Santa Fe, NM as a storm rolled in over the mountains earlier this afternoon.
Taking IR is a very different process from shooting “normal” pictures, at least given the camera I have and the way it is set up. Automatic exposure, white balance and focus are completely useless so everything’s manual. I need to remember to expose based solely on the red histogram (the camera’s auto exposure appears to be heavily biased towards blue and green and these are essentially absent in an IR image. As a result, the meter normally reads wildly under compared to the correct IR exposure, and using it generates very overexposed results) and use live-view with manual focus (IR confuses the TTL focus sensor and, although the camera is calibrated to focus correctly in live-view, I find the results hit-or-miss so use manual focusing of the zoomed live-view image instead).
If you get the exposure and focus right, processing the image is also trickier than for a visible light shot. This is a multi-step operation involving three tools – Nikon View NX to adjust the white balance (because Lightroom and Photoshop won’t let me push it far enough), Photoshop to swap the red and blue channels (to get the blue sky back and give me the great golden foliage) and Lightroom for final rework.
For the technically inclined...