In the red

Although it is still showery today after a week of rain and grey clouds and showers, there were enough bright times for me to venture out with  my camera and the new 720 IR filter that I had just purchased through Ebay. I tried to get to see the volume of water in the Little Nerang Dam, which is only a few kilometres up the mountain from where I live. Half way along the narrow, windy road leading to the Dam, an iron gate stopped the car. Access was denied! I turned the car around and decided that if I couldn't go to the dam then this would have to do for my first attempt. The sun was coming and going so quickly that I felt that I would not have many opportunities.
The beauty of the internet is that there is lots of information for those who look for it. I had read up several articles that had been written about how to use an infra red filter so I knew roughly what I should do.
The filter is so dark that it is impossible to see through it. All automatic features on any camera are useless. The advise I had taken was to set up the camera on a tripod, have a low ISO to avoid getting too much "noise" - the camera was already set on 200, so that is where I left it.
I focused on the scene without the filter and with the camera set to Manual Focus.
The IR filter was then carefully screwed into place without changing the position of the camera or the focus ring. The shutter speed was slowed down to 2 seconds - I felt  that I should start somewhere and slow the shutter speed further if the image on the LCD screen was too dark.
The Aperture I set to f/8

It looks pretty gruesome but this is how my first picture came out. I had been spot on with my settings and there was a good histogram shape from dark to light.
This was pretty exciting stuff! (don't you love experimenting? I do!)
I turned the camera around and took a shot in the other direction  - but before I show you that shot I will show you what Photoshop Elements allowed me to do with this picture.

I opened the picture in Adobe Raw to start with to brighten the dark area on the right and then in Elements went to Enhance - Convert to Black and White. There are several options and I chose "Infrared Effect" and tweaked the sliders to get this result. I moved the red slider much further than the automatic adjustment suggested. This feature in Adobe Photoshop Elements is usually applied to a naturally coloured picture and my picture was monochrome red.
Here is the same effect used on the second picture I took.

This also was a two second shot but after carrying out the same sort of adjustments I did one thing more. The sky was ultra bright so I selected Enhance - Color - Replace color and selected a sample from the sky and changed the fuzziness to make sure that it was only the sky that showed in the sample window, then I simply moved the "Lightness" to the left to darken it. I was surprised to see that there was actually a variation in the sky. The darker sky certainly made a difference to the overall look of the image.
Incidentally, that is the gate that barred the way to the Little Nerang Dam!
Off I went to another location not very far from this, where there is a small park containing a picnic shelter.
This is one of the shots I took there - this time the exposure was 5 seconds (light fading by now) but still reasonable results.

I am sure that using the more sophisticated full version of Photoshop CS5 that different results can be achieved with the shots that I have taken. I believe that Infrared photography works much better when the sunlight is really bright. So I will be having another try another day!
AJ