I finally made it out yesterday evening, after being stuck indoors for more days than I’d have liked. The sky cleared completely and a headed up to Lackawanna with some good friends to catch the evening light.

Back in March I ordered a Cokin Infrared filter, which I’ve managed to use a grand total of two times since, yesterday being one of them. Alright, so IR isn’t quite “rose colored” – in fact, the filter itself is a very dark red, and as many of you likely already know, restricts the wavelengths of the light entering the lens to those in the infrared range.

Cameras, by design, aren’t too good at seeing IR light. The high-pass filter that sits directly in front of the digital sensor removes most IR light that enters. Since 99% of photography is done in regular light, this isn’t a problem – except for photographers who want to dabble in IR. If you’re like me and fall in this minority group, you’ve got two options:

1.) Spend $300-$500 and get your camera converted. This means sending it out to one of several companies that open it up and remove the offending high-pass filter, replacing it with one that is friendly to IR light. And since you probably don’t want this modification on your regular camera, you’ll need a second camera for it (both P&S and DSLRs can be converted). Altogether, an expensive proposition, albeit one that solves most of the problems that I’ll get to in a moment.

2.) Buy an IR filter ($50), slap it on the front of your lens, and hope for the best.

I say “hope for the best” because there are definite limitations to this method. Consider: the light is passing through a very dark IR filter, going through the lens aperture, and then through the high-pass filter before hitting the sensor. The IR filter eliminates regular light, and the high-pass greatly reduces the IR, leaving you with….not much at all.

With the IR filter mounted, you can barely see through the viewfinder on the brightest of days. I tend to mash my face against the camera, pressing my eye as close as possible to the viewfinder, usually using at least one hand to shade it. If I give my eye a few seconds to adjust, I can begin to see the scene – sometimes, if it’s bright enough!

The alternative, of course, is to remove the filter, compose your shot, then replace the filter. This is where the Cokin filter really shines, since it just slides into its holder, unlike screw-on filters, which may knock you lens back out of composition in the process of mounting them.

If you haven’t guessed by now, we’re deep into tripod territory here. Even at ISO 3200, f/4, shutter speeds with the IR filter are nearly a full second – far too long to hand-hold with any hope of clarity. Go with good landscape f-stops like f/8 and f/11, and you’re talking long exposures.

The shots shown here were all taken at about 6 pm, with direct sunlight still on the trees & lake. Using the Canon 28-135mm lens, I shot them all at about f/8, ISO 200, with shutter speeds anywhere from 5″ to 25″. (I left the ISO at 200 because I was already on the tripod – at that point 5″ or 25″ doesn’t make much difference, and the longer time smooths out the clouds & water.)

As if this weren’t tricky enough already, it gets worse. First off, successful IR photos require an extreme custom white balance. Because this is so extreme, AdobeRAW doesn’t recognize it when you load the images into Bridge – instead of appearing with the custom WB, they revert to a nuclear red. There are several methods of editing them, all of which involve multiple steps. I’m still finessing my preferred way, which includes taking the image into PSCS3 in its nuclear form, adding a Hue&Sat layer set to “colorize,” then converting to B&W before Levels, Curves, Contrast, and Dodge & Burn layers.

I’m told that if you use the Canon Digital Photo Pro software that comes with the camera, it will correctly interpret the custom white balance (since it understands the proprietary coding). Frankly, I hate DPP and don’t really want it kicking around my hard drive – but if it really does work, then it may be worth it.

The alternative is to shoot in JPEG, which fuses the WB settings into the shot. (This is my Catch-22, since I love RAW and can’t stand the lack of those fine-tuning options in JPEG.)

And there’s one more point that needs mentioning. IR simply does not like certain lenses. This is something you can’t do much about – the physical construction of certain lenses just doesn’t play well with IR. My Tokina 12-24mm, which is an otherwise great lens, doesn’t work well for IR – it suffers terrible lens flare (which, interestingly enough, appears neon blue in IR shots). Since it’s a wide angle lens, larger hoods aren’t a real option. (Since it is on a tripod, I suppose I could position myself with a sheet of foam-core so as to cast a shadow over the lens, but that starts to look a little nutty…) 

So to sum up what has become a much longer post than I intended, IR photography can produce really cool images, but unless you’re going to do enough of it to justify converting a camera (which will eliminate most of the above issues), be prepared for a challenge. Personally, I find the challenge part of the fun, but there are moments when it is truly frustrating, and you become tempted to throw the damn filter into the lake.

On The Difficulty Scale, this is a solid 6.5 

But worth it.