Taking a Breath

 After a really really Grumpy Week [I was the Grump], I decided to take off and go hiking at my favorite place. The Kickapoo Valley Reserve.

I looked at the weather and decided to get a hike in at the Reserve because today [Friday] would not be a good day. We are having a snow and ice storm -- the roads are ice under the snow so it looks like a good day to cancel my eye doc appointment and reschedule.

I wanted to find the little ice cave again. I knew other ice flows would be more impressive, but I wanted to explore the bluff bottoms next to the river. The river is down and the ground below the bluffs are frozen so it seemed like a perfect opportunity.

I took my Infrared Camera. For those who don't understand what infrared does, it sees the light in different wavelengths depending on the filter used on the camera. It's complicated but the results are pretty fascinating.

Chlorophyll reflects light and so things that still are green and living show up in different colors. The light spectrum may be how other creatures can see the world.

Little iced pond not in IR.

Same pond with IRChrome filter which produces reddish foliage.

The bluffs, seen in IRChrome:

The red shows mosses and grasses against the rocks and dead plant matter.

This filter does show a red tint for foliage and blue for water and sky. The sun was shining brightly on the left of the shot below and so it basically blew out the whites.

In an odd shot I risked shooting towards the light and got another different look. Before special processing some of these photos look absolutely abysmal.

I swapped over to the 665nm filter and found one decent shot I could live with.

An 'unprocessed' shot using the 665nm filter:

Processed:

The trees above, straight out of camera 

and processed

And at last, after two hours of wandering and looking at rocks, moss, skies, and the river, I ended up at the little ice cave. It isn't the best or biggest one, just a personal favorite of mine.

A 'selfie' with my tiny pocket camera on a wrap around tripod.

By the time I got back to where I'd parked, I felt refreshed and calm. I was back in my happy place and it seems that I got rid of Ms. Grumpy.

Infrared Day

The Meadow - not in infrared. 

This is the area I'd like to be able to clip in some fashion. 

I just don't see that happening for me. At one time hubby would clip it with his tractor and brush hog.

In other places where I'd knocked down the burdock and sourdock, the motherwort is flourishing. 

I just can't win!

This scene is peaceful and calming.

It was too hot to do a lot of things outside. I usually clip the herds' manes by this time of the year, but I'm going to wait for my 'farm' help to do that this coming week. Charlie was nagging me for a walk so I headed up the driveway with just the Infrared camera.

Driveway: 665nm Filter

While hot days with a midday sun are horrible for most photography, those are the prime conditions for Infrared. Different filters with different wavelengths of light give different looks. 

Charlie was very unimpressed with the heat and hot sun. I thought I'd cool him off by heading into the forest...

Charlie in Infrared. Zombie Dog!

Infrared does some weird stuff to the eyes of people and dogs! They look really odd.

I gave Charlie a ride back to the ridge and started home.

This was neat in IR but I sure liked it in Sepia black and white better.

Neighobor's Vintage Tractor. 

He has put it up for sale.

I dropped the Hot Dog off at the house with hubby. They proceeded to watch really old strange Westerns on TV. I am not into blurry crappy movies at all. 

I grabbed a 720nm filter from my pile of ancient filters I had. I wanted to experiment and enjoy the summer day some more.

The herd under one of the boxelders they love to use for shade. I took this shot in Infrared with a 720nm filter which turns anything with chlorophyll in it basically white. 

Infrared is fun to experiment with. Thank goodnes
the mules didn't appear to be Zombies!

The 720nm filter will produce white leaves and blue sky
if you have a converted camera and use the green grass to set
your white balance.

Weird, right?

I got mesmerized by the backwards light of things. The dark greens I saw with my normal vision were bright white while the trunks and branches of the trees were dark and moody.

I got caught up in gazing up at the branches into the light. I shot a lot of photos more for the dark patterns of the branches than for anything else. 

Most of them didn't turn out as I 'saw' them in my mind, but it was fun to see the intricate patterns of the leaves and the branches.

Infrared offers so many possibilities in a creative way.

Locust tree budding out next
to our house. Those are leaves
not flowers.
The flowers will come in a few
days.

Yes, I do experiment a lot. It is the one thing I am passionate about. Monday was just a great day for it.

Playing with color

I was feeling antsy and decided to walk to the ridge before sunrise on Friday. I did notice that a very light Hoar Frost had settled on the trees along with a low lying fog.

Taken with my unmodified camera. ")

Some wind blew as I passed the neighbor's yard and frost dissipated everywhere.

I'm just not able to help myself. I took the Infrared camera along with me.

I can't stop being curious about how things would look in a different light. I keep thinking that if I keep at it, I may even get proficient at it in all situations.

Seriously, I do not know exactly why certain colors show up. Items that reflect a certain kind of light appear a certain way. I can't explain it very well without referring to a long drawn out article on what spectrum the human eyes see and what we can't see.

In the 720nm spectrum, green leaves become white and the sky becomes very orange.

This is shot in the 665nm spectrum. 

I used a method called channel swapping to achieve these colors below.

The reddish tint on the trees can be yellow, reddish, or desaturated to be white.

And in the other direction...I removed the color in the trees but kept the bluish sky.

Have you gotten tired of Infrared? Two more samples from late afternoon.

This is with the 550nm filter. I haven't gotten the hang of it quite yet and I find I don't like it very much. The photo that comes out of camera is absolutely ugly.

I've did the channel swapping and the it still was horrible. More than likely it is because there isn't any bright green leaves, pines, or water to really make this sort of workable. Ick.

Edited to black and white, I find it somewhat pleasing, especially the sky.

The old car in the run off ditch is rusty colored but I sort of like this after I balanced the snow to pure white.

I went to black and white with this also.

And I loved it. The details in the rust came out like magic in B&W.

So maybe this filter isn't so bad as it shows variations in tone nicely.

Last year I did have one great day with that filter at the KVR big pond.

The thing I like about IR is there are no rules of color. It is like giving a kid a box of crayons and telling them to go wild.

...

Stay tuned for Dragons.

And a Foggy walk in IRChrome.

Ice hunting part II

The wind chills were pretty darned cool. I think it may have gotten up to about 10F.

Hubby said 'Geeze, isn't it cold?'

I replied with my catch phrase. 

"Det finnes ikke darlig vaer darlig klaer!" 

Actually I don't speak Norwegian but said it in English.
There's no bad weather, only bad clothes.

Maybe I love the cold weather so much because I can wear all my funky crazy hats that are warm and odd.  More on my hats some other time.

Snowshoes were my choice this time. They have long teeth for climbing slippery ice packed slopes and can keep a person from wading through deep snow while brush busting. [Read that as going off trail.]

I wear snowshoes with crampons. My old ones have never failed me yet. 

The picture above is taken where I was standing on a steep slope. Below me is a stream. Last time I was through here, the traction was terrible. This is not a path I would suggest to those with poor balance skills. 

I stopped and looked at the first set of ice formations. After the next snow it will look like there are floating islands of waterfalls. This is always impressive to see.

I even tried it with my little Canon ELPH infared camera. The unedited shot right out of the camera looks horrid.

Without direct sun and 'into' shade, this little camera has a terrible time. I mean this photo looks like mud.

Even with some edits, it didn't turn out much better. 

The pocket camera is very limited and IR can be very tricky. This shot turned out noisy and honestly, pretty crappy. But I tried!

I climbed over the ridge and found the equine trail we used to ride from Ma and Pa's Camp. I followed that over the next set of ice formations and trekked through Prickly Ash and low branches to drop into the next valley. 

A nice little hiking 

challenge

Yes, those snowshoes were a huge help! 

I ended up where I'd taken Bill and the kids two weeks ago.
This is the Infrared Version of it.

I was more interested in experimenting with the tiny pocket camera than I was in using the regular one.

I wanted to go wild with Infrared and see what winter would do to it.

The Beaver Dam

Cool Tree

What if we did see in a different 

spectrum of light?

Wiester Creek Ice

My favorite one of

the day.

And then...

Wiester Creek in regular color...

I just sent in my older Olympus to be converted to full spectrum so I can enjoy the alternate colors of the light spectrum. 
I admit, it is not for a lot of people. But for me it is another way of exploring how we see things.

My little Canon really stinks in low light, and it rarely focuses properly if you try to zoom in on a scene. But I've figured out how to work with it and have fun.

That is my point. Explore and have fun. 

Oh and

"Det finnes ikke darlig vaer darlig klaer!" 

Infrared Photography a journey in colors and light

If you read any of my stuff, you will know that I have always loved Infrared Photography. Even before I tried to stand it at all. I started out just getting 720nm Filter and putting it on my Olympus E 420. The shots were frustrating and I generally had to take super long exposures with an outcome of RED bleh photos.

They may not be so bleh, but I had no understanding at all about what 'white' balance was or even a light spectrum. All I knew is that I could produce some other-worldly photos. These are the first tries.

The exposures were something along 30 seconds or more and the photos started out as Beet Red. If I used a Nikon camera, I couldn't even be sure of the focus as the filter was SO dark!

Still, I would keep trying. I'd put the filter away and do other things. Then try some more. I wasn't exactly happy with all of it, but I felt that I could learn.

I generally carried the 720nm filter with me anyway. The shot below is a full 2 minute exposure. 

It would take me another 2 years to decide to purchase a Full Spectrum Point and Shoot Infrared camera.

There are companies that will take a normal camera and take out the filter that blocks Infrared light.

I decided to try one. A Canon ELPH 180 with 3 IR filters. I then decided to try to understand things called False Color and Channel Swapping. Most of the programs I had didn't do well with it. Below is one of my first attempts at making something with the tiny camera.

I really didn't know much of what I was doing, but I was still fascinated with the oddity of the photos.

The adventures I took were fun and many of the photos became black and white edits because the colors were just too strange for my tastes.

Then I took my old Olympus camera that had some issues and sent it in to have a full spectrum conversion. What does that even mean? It means that a filter added to the front of the lens can see in different light spectrums. I chose a 550nm, a 665nm, a 720nm, and an 850nm. I find the 850nm fun but it is strictly only to shoot in black and white.

From what I understand we only see a small spectrum of light. Bugs, may see slightly different than us and perhaps some animals do too.

The chart above shows our visible 'light'. Really, I am not one to explain it at all.
However I know that the 550nm filter gives me a very strange photo to start with.

The colors are odd and strange right out of the camera. I see most people edit this with a red foliage in a channel swap. I got something much different in my edit. I can't explain it. That sickly yellow became a blue with the Green Hue after a Channel Swap.

Confused yet? Don't be. I went even further just to make tiny adjustments to the colors that were available to me. Green produced blue skies.
Yellow added more oddness to the blue sky. Orange pushed to the max produced a purplish color.
And so forth. 

Nothing made common sense but the more I experimented, the more fun I had.
But the result was quite interesting:

Maybe it isn't your thing, but I found it fascinating.
Being able to use a light spectrum to see the world as my child self had once seen it was the absolute bomb! 
The sky did not have to be one color. Leaves could be purple, green, and pink. Infrared has made my inner child happy.

Below is a straight out of the camera shot with a 665nm Filter.

Below:
I liked the orangish colored sky. Was is fantasy or Apocalyptic?

And then the Channel Swap that is proper with this filter next:
Pretty enough and odd enough, but I liked the above version much better.

I am glad I sent in the Olympus OMD EM5. Now the poor thing's LCD screen turns green and sometimes I can't get it to properly expose shots.
I can use program mode and sometimes manual mode. But the camera has a bit of its own mind lately. That has made some of this year's photography a bit more interesting.

The last filter I will talk about is the IRChrome filter. Exactly how it works? I have no idea except that it allows me a huge leeway with colors.

Last thoughts. 
Winter is coming and that means less light reflection because the trees will have lost their leaves. 
However, I wonder what I can do with winter?

I didn't have much luck last year, however I am willing to approach it again this year.

I am always going to be learning and experimenting. 
Oh and I will have to replace the Oly EM5. After all, it is 8 yrs old and has been beaten relentlessly by me carrying it around since day one in all sorts of weather.

Tsk..tsk. In December I'll probably send in its replacement to be converted to full spectrum. 

I love light and colors in a different spectrum!