Today

Adirondacks

Nothing soothes me more than the great outdoors! I recently spent a few days in the Adirondacks in New York. Here are some of my favorite shots.

Billy's Garden in Infrared

If you have checked out my Medium Format Love page you will notice that I love shooting in infrared.  There is just something so magical about being able to capture photosynthesis, which feeds every organism on earth, however, is not visible to our eyes.

For the longest time my favorite tools have been my Great Wall camera, which is a cheap, Chinese, Hassleblad wanna-be, and Efke 820 IR film.   Through a lot of experimentation I had finally found the exposure times and development times that gave the effect I was after (when I started using this film there was no info out there on desired exposure and development times, not even on the Digitaltruth.com 's Massive Development chart).  I accomplished my effects by using an opaque Hoya filter and on the brightest day possible will shoot at F16@8sec. If it is a slightly cloudy or overcast day I bracket @ 8sec, 16sec, and 32sec. I found that the perfect developer and time for this film and exposure is Kodak's HC110 dilution B for 8:30.

Here is an image shot just as described...

 

With the purchase of my DSLR last year, unfortunatly, I have not touched any film or chemistry :-( .

I had, however, done a lot of reading on shooting digital infrared. From what I had gathered there is a small piece on the sensor of a digital camera that is there to block infrared rays from entering. If this piece is removed than infrared light will be visible.

I was NOT about to do that to my brand new D7000 in which I purchased specifically to start a business! So I didn't remove that piece, but just for fun one day I put my opaque filter on the lens and ventured through Billy's garden. 

These images are not nearly as sharp as ones I have captured on film, and exposure times are longer which doesn't help that problem on a windy day (especially with close-ups, ugh!). I took the photos last week. I used my Hoya IR filter.  I shot in RAW. My ISO was set at 400 (in the future I will go higher to shorten shutter speed, not to mention the noise reduction in the D7000 is quite AWESOME), my aperture F16, shutter speed 30sec.  I then imported them into Adobe Lightroom and  de-saturated the images (they come out red because of the filter).  I tinkered with the 'Blacks' setting, and here are my results:

 

I think the effect is quite nice!

Niki and Chris

On May 12th I had the opportunity to photograph the wedding of a lovely couple, Niki and Chris.   It was a very small ceremony and they had booked me only for coverage of the ceremony and some formals afterwards.  Here are some of my favorite shots of their special day.

A day at Sherwood with Ally and Addy