PAD 209 - Abbotsbury Churchyard

[Mike Farley]

Day 209 and a day mostly spent travelling and meeting family. Just time for a few quick shots in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Abbotsbury, with St Catherine's Chapel atop the hill in the background.

Canon EOS 450D converted to infrared, 720 nm filter
EF 17-40 f/4L USM
Focal length 17 mm
1/250 sec
f/8
ISO 200

[Nina]

Infrared works well here, as we found out at another cemetery we visited together a while back.

[Mike Farley]

Thanks, Nina. I do find that when there is an attractive scene but the light is not right for a conventional image, infrared is a useful option to have as it introduces drama that is not always visible to the naked eye. Another advantage is that dynamic range tends to be less of an issue in infrared and I do not ge the same level of "blinkies" with my infrared camera as I do with the 7D. The sensor in the latter is now very old technology (four years!) in digital terms and more recent developments, especially those from Sony/Nikon, are better for dynamic range which might help lessen the need for ND grads when shooting landscapes. It will be interesting to see whether Canon's new sensor technology being introduced in the forthcoming 70D has made up any of the ground it has ceded to Sony over the past couple of years.

The shots of the churchyard which I took at the same time with my normal camera are on another computer, but I'll post a sample when I have opportunity to allow a comparison.

[Mike Farley]

A couple more of the same scene, this time taken conventionally with my Canon 7D to demonstrate the difference that infrared can make.

This shot was as metered and the sky has lost a lot of detail where the highlights have blown.

Abbotsbury Churchyard - blown highlights

Abbotsbury Churchyard-2.jpg (133.07 KiB) Viewed 1709 times

The second shot was metered for the sky, which left the foreground very dark in the unprocessed Raw file and this has been corrected by boosting the Shadows in ACR.

Abbotsbury Churchyard - exposed for the sky

Abbotsbury Churchyard-3.jpg (127.34 KiB) Viewed 1709 times

To my mind, neither has the same dramatic quality as the infrared image although that it should be noted that the lighting did change between the two shooting sequences, as evidenced by the lack of shadows in the conventional shots.

[davidc]

I'm guessing the infrared shots have been through silver efex pro as well? If so, do you have raw-conversion only shots?

[Mike Farley]

Correct, mono conversion is in SEP2. I generally use the High Structure (harsh) preset and then add a bit of vignetting and a border. The SEP2 adjustments are in a separate layer, so it is straightforward to show start image, although there will be a colour cast.

Or do you want to see straight out of camera images? Once again that is not straightforward as the camera has a custom white balance for IR which ACR does not recognise, so I have created my own custom profile. This was all covered in my "Taken As Red" presentation given at the club earlier this year if you were there.

[Paul Heester]

Id always thought it was the foliage that had the greatest impact with IR but Im beginning to think the sky is equally transformed as well. Thanks for posting the comparison shots.

[Mike Farley]

Hi Paul

Glad you found the post useful. It's not just foliage and skies that benefit from infrared, but also trees I am finding. It picks up textures in the bark which conventional photography just does not seem to.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=427

[davidc]

I thought foliage was the most affected too and that IR had less impact on the sky - it looked to me like much of the effect was down to the plugin rather the IR camera, hence the request to see an "untouched" image.

As for which image, I don't mind - whatever you have immediately before passing it via SEP2 is fine. I find that SEP2 definitely gives mono images a distinctive look and because I'm considering an IR camera myself I was curious to see what I'd be getting without the plugin.

[Mike Farley]

Here you go.

This started life as a Raw file and has been processed using ACR in LR5. For completeness I am including the starting image where the only change I have made is to apply a custom profile camera calibration created in Adobe's DNG Profile Creator to remove the red cast which ACR applies by default.

Image out of camera with custom profile calibration

Abbotsbury Churchyard - Raw.jpg (121.48 KiB) Viewed 1692 times

As you can see, it appears over exposed but I find that I can usually expose to the right when shooting, especially in bright conditions. I quite often have the exposure compensation set to +2EV in such circumstances.

The second image is after processing in LR5, but before the SEP2 adjustments are added.

Image after Lr5 processing, but pre SEP2

Abbotsbury Churchyard - Pre SEP2.jpg (126.76 KiB) Viewed 1692 times