Infrared Shots at Amicalola Falls

Well the weather was terrible Saturday, rainy and cold, so I stayed in. But I got out on Sunday to take some test shots. It was fairly cold out, 36 at home at noon time. I headed out Amicalola Falls to see about getting some shots to see what we could capture. By the time I'd reached the top of the falls on it's mount, it was down to well under 35. Even with gloves on and taking them off only long enough to adjust camera settings and various details, I rather quickly lost feeling in my fingers. We had very light snowflakes for most of the time I was there. After the first hour, I had nothing but constant pain below the knuckles of each hand so I packed up and headed back a bit before I'd have liked. But still, managed to get some shots that show what the camera can do.

This is a very simple shot with a Nikon D80 as a reference shot for the scene.

Then I set up the Infrared camera to see what it would show me. This is with a basic forrest green card used for the white balance.Here's the same one with the R/B channels switched.

I'm not sure if this was a typical example, but I seemed to have a much easier time getting an exposure balance with the IR shots than the normal shots. On the normal shots the lighting difference between the waterfall at the bottom of the frame and the sky at the top were too many stops apart to get any one shot that had detail in both. But with the IR converted Canon G9 it was fairly easy.

One thing I'll say abut the G9, the way it shows the picture on the back on the 3 inch screen is pretty nice. The display is adjusted to your expose settings. So as you dial in aperture or shutter speed, it adjusts the display to show you pretty much exactly what you are going to get. This has made it a lot more fun to go through the steps of learning what IR can do.

Conversely the G9 has it's downside. The noise level of the pictures is enough to have taken me back when I saw the first ones. I shot everything on this trip at the lowest ISO it supports (ISO 80) and it's much better. But even shooting at 400 I saw a lot more noise in the pictures that I'd like to ever see. Now granted, this might be part of the nature of converting to IR, I'm no expert. But even reviews in various places like DPReview said that it showed more noise than they were happy with. Being as my goal is almost entirely outdoor shots, I should be OK with sticking to the lower ISO. It's also worth noting that I have the Noise Reduction settings on the camera turned off. I can do noise reduction in Photoshop, so I'd like the originals to be as unaltered by the camera as possible.

On the way back from the falls, I stopped by a small roadside graveyard. I'll confess that over the past year I've developed a certain fascination with wanting to shoot pictures of the graveyards. I'll get those uploaded tomorrow.