Coming up on Infrared

I finally started to experiment with infrared photography. I was planning on this since a while and last week I received a Hoya R72 filter. This weekend I did some first tries in New York. So what's the story? Most image sensors in digital cameras are sensitive to wavelengths that our eyes can't see (near infrared).
These are exactly the wavelengths that the R72 lets through and blocks everything else. The funny thing is that even if your image sensor can see this light, it won't get much of it since this is filtered out by another filter inside most cameras before it can touch the sensor. This is done for image quality reasons. As a result you don't have much light reaching the sensor at all once your R72 is attached to your lens. This of course leads to quite long exposure times (minutes). I have to say that this doesn't really bother me. I like long exposures especially when having moving clouds in the frame.
So far I didn't have time for a closer look at my first results. All I can say is that they are really red and that some extra work needs to be done for a decent black & white conversion...

ATM

Frontside Kickflip

Location: City Hall, Philadelphia.
Date: Fall 2006

Sky and Ocean and Rock

And something that looks like the light of an airplane.

Sky and Ocean

LeBron James on the go

I went to the Nets vs. Cavaliers game. Even though my seat was all the way in the back, I managed to take some reasonable pictures with a Canon 70-200mm f4.0 lens that I borrowed from a friend.

Ocean and Sky

Still one of my first tries in nightly long-time exposure and with long-time I mean a couple of minutes. This brings new challenges, namely fighting against noise. I even have it at 100 ISO with my 20D and every time I tune the contrast a little I have to run a noise reduction filter to keep the image smooth. This results in loss of detail. I'm using layer masks to bring details back wherever they contribute to the image. For example the texture of the moving clouds.

Sitting on stairs

Quack!

Quack quack quack quack quack, quack quack. Quack quack quack quack quack quaaaack quack quack.

Full moon photography

This is a three minute exposure at two in the morning.