Sunday 19 October 2014

High Contrast Landscape - High Contrast Black and White

Some time ago I paid $350 or so to have an old Canon EOS400D converted to shoot (only) colour infra-red images.  It's a neat thing to do with a completely superseded (and somewhat worthless) old DSLR camera.
I used to shoot a lot of (real) infra-red film back in the day - so shooting digital black-and-white is a cinch - no tripod, no ultra-slow shutter speeds shooting something you can barely see through the deep red filter used to get the IR effect.  Once converted you just use the camera as you would shooting for colour - only using a special custom White Balance that the [conversion] company sets for you.
You can then use the colour IR RAW files it produces and convert those to black-and-white or shoot black-and-white JPEGs.
Here are some evening shots taken in Broken Hill's signature Living Desert sculpture park nine kms out of town.  It's a very harsh environment so I thought the stark IR effect particularly applicable. For those interested, I sent the camera to LifePixel in the States for the conversion. The company had a special on at the time so it cost a lot less than If I had sent it to Melbourne for the same conversion (www.lifepixel.com).

This is a three-frame HDR shot - there was a slight breeze so the tips of the trees came out a bit furry - the effect of slight movement between exposures.
The infra red effect really enhanced the 3D texture of this sculpture while emphasising the embossed carvings. 
Actually it looks 100% better than the one I shot in colour
Looks like a goanna staring into space.  Shooting digital infra-red is easy and produces a number of different colour and black-and-white (post-processing) options.

1 comment:

  1. Beautiful and fascinating. At first glance before downloading the post, I thought it was a snowy scene! Love the embossed b

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