High Sierra Topix

Well, technically that light has been around for a little while and we're not technically seeing that light, but you know what I mean. When John Muir called the Sierra the Range of Light, he was very careful not to specify "Range of Visible Light". Smart man. It's weird to think about all that's going on around us that we can't visualize (at least with some equipment, which even then translates it into something else that we can see). I recently became interested in IR photography after seeing some eerie looking photos of otherwise benign subject matter. And thanks to chlorophyll's absorption spectrum, you can get a ton of near-IR light reflected any place with plant life. I recently bought a cheap little point-and-shoot camera that was converted to capturing IR (not sure but believe it has to do with removing an internal filter that determines which wavelengths of light hit the sensor...don't quote me on that). I tried searching forums here for IR/near-IR pictures but only found mentions of IR in other contexts (i.e., equipment). Thus, I thought I'd mess around with some near-IR photos from a few Sierra places. I did the channel mix to make the sky somewhat blue (dogma seems to be red channel = red 0, blue 1 and blue channel = red 1, blue 0). I know very little about this stuff and am very new to this but thought it'd be interesting to post anyway. So as a disclaimer, this isn't meant to be art; just fun. I hope the pics aren't too dim, either (tried using histograms this time around).

Nice.
If I may, would recommend reducing your highlights, they are quite bright in some of the pictures, so much so that the details are washed out. My preference for IR is to do black & white, which can turn out quite nice, though none have made it to my purchasing gallery.

maverick wrote:If I may

You may! At some point I'll go and work on them again. Feel free to critique any photos, even the color ones on trip reports.

My bad, there is one IR in my gallery.

I couldn't do much for those pictures so I gave it another try with a different picture. I put highlights to minimum for the whole picture, then used the radial filter in Lightroom to select the forested areas and put highlights to minimum there. I exported the image, imported the new image, then repeated the process. I also played around with shadows, contrast, and clarity. If nothing else, maybe all the noise gives some texture!

Is this the same as the "infrared" option in Photoshop Elements 10 for converting to black and white? I suspect the Photoshop option simulates the infrared effect, not truly an infrared image. If I understand what you said, you adjusted your camera to detect actual infrared? If so do all cameras do this?

I do not know enough about the setting, but with trial-and-error, I find that certain shots work out very well, but I go back and darken the highlights and sometimes reduce the contrast. Sometimes this setting gets too busy, though. I also find that there is a white "halo" where the dark black sky and mountain ridges meet. Not sure what that is all about. I actually see the halo on the photo on the last post. Mav's photo does not have that halo.

Anyway, it is fun to play around with.

Nice pics, thanks for posting.
"Devil's Postpile, which just happens to be next to Infra-Reds Meadow"
Yeah, I see what you did there...Clever