Graveyard in Infrared

On the way back from the waterfall, I stopped by an old roadside graveyard. I've developed a certain fascination on these roadside graveyards recently. I may wind up starting to collect shots from various ones in the region. No idea why, it's just this urge I have.

I didn't take any reference shots on those, so I only have the Infrared shots to show. All of these were with white balance set to the same forest green that's been doing so well for me when shooting outdoors with the Infrared camera. All of these shots, except where noted on the last one, are just as they came out of the camera, no tweaking.

What's making this a lot more fun than I expected is that the converted Canon G9 lets me take IR snapshots with the speed and ease of a conventional camera. Whereas each particular desired shot would have taken a half hour of trial and error with a conventional digital camera and an IR filter, these are basically point and shoot so I get to collect a large number of sample shots.

Here are a few basic shots that came out of about 10 minutes of running around the graveyard basically just snapping shots of everything in sight. In several cases, I manually dialed in some quick exposure bracketing just to be sure I got something usable. One of the challenges of shooting like this is that it's hard to know what's going to be really interesting until you get it back to your computer and see what the color scales really turned out like. The best part of digital is that essentially it's free, so take as many pictures as you feel like and sort them out afterwards. What turns out well is kind of surprising.

I started by just shooting several of the larger markers and trying to get some background and some sky into each shot to give it some range for the camera to play with for how it would attempt to treat the shots as color photographs.

After those, I started looking around for some shots to try and work in the rows of more conforming markers. But this is a very old graveyard and placement is somewhat irregular. Nevertheless, it made for some interesting shots:

Last, I took one shot and spent some time tweaking it, adjusted contrast, bit of a diffused blur and give it a slightly ghostly feel. Currently this is serving as my new desktop wallpaper.