A while back I was perusing the internet and happened across a few photographers experimenting with infrared photography. They had custom built their cameras with infrared lenses and sensors, and the photographs those cameras yielded were pretty incredible. Ghostly alien landscapes with brilliant bright blues, whites, and reds that accentuated a magnificently smooth black.
I really liked the photographs, so I did some research and found I was about a thousand dollars short of getting any sort of custom built camera. So I bought a small infrared filter and started playing. Unfortunately you really need a significant amount of vegetation and sun light to produce a good shot so it's taken me a few years to develop my own method.
At the moment this is how I do it. I start by taking a two to five minute exposure of a full frame of grass. If the exposure is right the grass will be bright red in the shot. The time required for the exposure is completely dependent on the amount of sun light, so a lot of trial and error is required. After I've got my bright red grass, I set my in cameras custom white balance to read the red grass as white. After I was free to start photographing. Every shot is about two to five minutes long for this as well. At this point I started to notice some pretty cool stuff, the tints of color were dependent on the season because the grass changes color over the year. The more light absorbed by an object, the darker that object became in camera. Even the slightest amount of wind would shake the trees and ruin my shots, but they did produce some very ghostly effects. Clouds are probably the coolest things in camera, they produced long white trails cataloging their movement through the sky, almost like wet paint that moved slowly over sky. In the late spring the photographs would have tints of red, mid summer they would be a very gray shade of light blue, and as summer turned to fall the shots would turn gray. I tried taking some pictures during the late fall but I had to shoot them in B&W mode due to the lack of vegetation.
What you see here are the photographs I am most happy with from about three years of experimentation. All shots are edited in camera, and are un-aquatinted with photoshop.
