Our Backyard in a New Light... Quite Literally

I had previously written about sending one of my old camera bodies in for service.  I sent it to the west coast to have the sensor converted from seeing and capturing images in visible light to only seeing and imaging in infrared light.  

There are different levels of infrared conversions that can be done but I chose to have this camera body converted to see only light wavelengths above 830nm which is deeper into the infrared wavelengths.  These wavelengths make for very interesting, very crisp black and white images with a clarity you simply cannot attain in visible light.  Some things render the same in infrared light but many things a quite different with a very noticeable increase in clarity.

Naturally, I couldn't wait for my old camera to arrive on my doorstep.  It arrived last night about two weeks earlier than I had expected, but still, it seemed like an eternity to me.  I think it spent more time traveling from and to the east coast during shipping than it did at the facility for conversion.  Needless to say, I was very excited to see our UPS driver last night with this camera in hand.  

As excited as I was, I was still a bit disappointed because it did not arrive during the day when the sun was shining.  Infrared imaging really requires bright sunlight and lots of foliage for the best and most interesting results.  This time of year I cannot do much about the lack of foliage but we do still get occasional sun so I was hoping it would arrive during the day so I could immediately test it.  Since it was nighttime when it arrived, instead of testing my newly converted camera right away, I spent some time cleaning up the camera and checked all the settings in preparation to a sunny day which, fortunately, happened to be today.

It was still overcast this morning but the sky cleared by lunchtime so I was able to test the camera by capturing a few quick snapshots in our backyard.  Here is a photo of our backyard looking toward our putting green.   This view looks quite different than anything I've seen in visible light!  The sun was just outside the top of the frame toward the right side.  Although this image looks very good, shooting toward the sun isn't ideal.  I did manage to avoid lens flares in this image though.  I'm not sure I would even recognize this as our backyard if I didn't shoot the photo myself.

I should point out that the tree branches in these photos do not have any snow on them.  The ground, however, is still covered in fairly deep snow.

Blue skies render to a very dark shade in infrared light.  The blue that our eyes see is in a different spectrum of light.  Additionally, the blue sky we see with our naked eye is really light reflecting off our atmosphere.  In infrared light, blue skies are almost black which makes for very dramatic and contrasty imagery...

Foliage renders as a very bright shade of white.  Our spruce tree appears snow covered but it is really the infrared light reflecting off of chlorophyll in the needles.  Leaves actually render as an even brighter shade of white due to having more chlorophyll.  We'll have to wait for some images of trees full of leaves.  In the meantime, here is an image of our spruce tree against the dark blue sky...  

These completely bare branches, below, even rendered a bit brighter than they would have in visible light.  I'll have to do more experimenting to see what subjects become very interesting and detailed in infrared light...

Below is an image of our next door neighbor's pine tree against a blue sky...

And, below, is a branch of our spruce tree against the blue sky...

I wasn't sure how this one, below, of the spruce tree trunk would look when I shot it but I tried it anyway.  I think it has a little bit of extra clarity than in visible light but the difference is really negligible here in this example.

Actually, I was testing my 45-200mm lens when I shot this photo of the tree trunk.  I had read numerous reports stating that this lens is unusable for infrared imaging...  I believe the reports I read were quite wrong...

Below are some bare branches of shrubs in our backyard.  I think these are actually wild blackberry plants... 

In this next photo, I was looking almost straight up toward the sky.  This tree branch seems to show even more clarity than the tree trunk above.  I like this one...

I shot these photos using three different lenses and, surprisingly, they all worked just fine in infrared.  I tested my new Panasonic 12-32mm, my old Olympus 14-42mm, and my Panasonic 45-200mm.  They all worked just fine.  I'll probably use the 12-32mm lens the most for this type of imaging.  This is a very small lens on a very small camera body (pictured in the lead photo of this blog entry).  

I have a few ideas of where to shoot more infrared images when spring begins to produce some foliage.  I'm actually quite excited to do more infrared imaging which is a really good thing because I have been getting a bit bored with my photography in recent years.  

Now I just need to wait a couple more months for foliage to grow....