Infrared Photography - My First Try

Infrared Photography - Part Two

On Ascension weekend, I was visiting friends in my old home in Saxony-Anhalt (Germany). The weather was ideal: sunny and pleasantly warm. We took advantage of the beautiful weather to take a trip to the Harz Mountains. So far, I had only seen the Hamburg coat of arms near Timmenrode, a 20 km long rock formation called the Devil's Wall. There is also a cave there called Teufelsloch. But that's not what we're going to talk about today.

The Teufelsmauer is surrounded by orchards. Some of the cherries were already ripe and tasted delicious. Sheep were grazing in the meadows beneath the fruit trees. The whole area seemed very peaceful and idyllic.
We followed the path to the Bode, a small river in the Harz Mountains.

Of course, I didn't want to go home empty-handed and took some photos with my camera, which had been converted to an undefined light spectrum. I was equipped with a modified NIKON Z5. I had mounted a Canon EF16-35mm ƒ4L IS USM lens on the camera with the help of the MEIKE Drop-In Filter Mount Adapter EF to Z-Mount adapter. The adapter contained a 550nm drop-in filter.

After we had completed the Königstein circular hiking trail, we drove to Thale by car. There we hiked the hiking trail through a canyon along the Bode towards Treseburg. The last three IR photos were taken at the Bode. This canyon never ceases to fascinate me. I will definitely do this hike again.

In the last post I talked about the post-processing of IR photos. I've made a lot of progress recently working with Darktable. The processing time is now only a few minutes per image. The reduction in processing time has been achieved by the ability to save presets. The menus have been adapted so that the editing process runs chronologically from top to bottom.

The steps always run in the same order:

• Local contrast
• Vibrancy
• Contrast
• Chrominance
• Saturation
• Sharpening
• Exposure
• Haze removal
• Lens correction
• Denoising
• White balance
• Color calibration

I hope you enjoyed our little excursion into infrared photography and I'll see you again on my blog next Sunday.
So stay tuned!