Creative people ask the question, what if? What would happen if I tried this? Lee and I were on the Blue Ridge Parkway in heavy fog last
April when the mists partially cleared and we came upon this scene. Beautiful!
I knew when I took this photograph that I was going to convert it to B&W.
This shot was taken with my regular camera, but I also had
my camera that captures infrared (IR) light that is just outside of the visible
spectrum and turns it into visible red.
I usually use it in bright sunlight because the way it makes greens lighter
and blues darker creates very dramatic images.
What would happen, I thought, if I tried the IR camera here to lighten
the green? Wouldn't that accentuate the
ethereal feeling of the B&W image?
This is the out-of-the-camera IR
photograph. Hard to tell how well it
worked.
Here it is converted to B&W. Wow! I
really like this and will enter it into shows.
I thought I was finished with this image. But then the question popped into my mind,
what would happen if I tried colorizing it?
I played around with adding a texture and then using a rather obscure
Photoshop feature, and voila, I got this image! One of the really cool things is that
Photoshop added colors based on the relative lightness and darkness of the
underlying image and texture, thereby distributing them throughout the image,
something good painters do to achieve balance in their paintings.
I have been trying this technique on other IR images and often don't like the results. When it works, Wow!
You can see more examples of IR images at my website:
