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!