Cactus Garden - Wide Spectrum Camera and Various Filters

[eseavey7]

I went to a cactus garden today and used my wide spectrum camera with my favorite filters for artistic looks and colors. My 680nm filter passes just enough reds to get a nice orange sky, which is the first photo. For the next photo I used a Hoya 80A filter that passes a lot of blue, and cuts a lot of red and IR. Using selective white balance, the sky becomes saturated blue and foliage turns brownish. The interesting part is that the pink and red flowers and fruits maintain their colors. For the third photo I used a Hoya X1 filter that cuts most of the blues, passes green, and leaks IR. With selective white balance, certain plants end up pinkish, but not all, and the sky turns blue again. The last photo I used a Hoya sepia filter that cuts some blue but still passes some IR. Because the sensor is to sensitive to IR, it turns a typical sepia photo into an interesting mix of IR and sepia. Foliage and plants end up looking almost white as you would see in an IR shot, with the addition of the sepia colors. I like the IR leakage into these photos, as they look natural and yet surreal at the same time.

 

Eric

[colinbm]

Hi Eric

You have made the best use of this wonderful landscape :-))

[eseavey7]

Thank Colinbm,

In this next photo I took the technique idea from the "Assorted Chronochomic Scenes" thread, for which I used my 950nm IR filter. Basically any thing that moves, or where lighting changes over a specified time interval will show up in colors. Here I had a partially cloudy day, with some wind. The clouds will show up in colors and the moving trees that also cast moving shadows. To soften the colored edges, I wanted a long exposure, and therefore used my 950nm IR filter, and f/11, that required about 1 second exposures in about 40 second intervals. Now the moving trees are blurry, yet the rocks and cacti are not. I assigned the three shots to each of the color channels and added vignetting and soft focus effects, as well as some lighting adjustments.

 

Thanks again OIDoinyo for posting this technique.

 

Eric

[OlDoinyo]

The last image has some appealing details, such as the arc of CMY on the gravel around the central cactus group. Some other effects I do not understand, such as the starburst-like feature around the head of the cactus just to the right of the central spire. Perhaps this was created by one of your soft-focus procedures. Interesting work.

[eseavey7]

Thanks OIDoinyo. I saw those starburst effects too, and found it peculiar. I looked at the series of original photos, and it happens to be a couple of branches moving in the breeze. All I need to look for is anything that changed between shots, and after seeing the original shots made perfect sense. Still it is a strange pattern.

[Andrea B.]

Hello Eric - and welcome to UVP !! It has been a long time since I've seen you posting, so I'm happy you found us. Hope you enjoy our quiet little forum.

 

Thanks for the nice IR post. I'm not familiar with the Hoya filters, so it was interesting to see those fotos.