Wilmington River in Super Color IR

by Sean Setters

The bright, sunny days of spring, summer and fall present perfect image-making opportunities when you have an infrared converted camera in your gear bag. For me, that camera is an EOS 7D converted by LifePixel with a Super Color IR sensor.

While conventional photographic wisdom dictates that the golden hours just after sunrise and before sunset are ideal times for image-making, those with an IR camera at hand can take full advantage of midday sun to create compelling IR images. This IR benefit came in handy a couple of weeks ago.

Seeing a beautiful blue, midday sky overhead on my way to the mailbox around 1pm, I decided to head out with the IR camera to a spot I had filed in the back of my memory. It was a small parking area off of Victory Dr. on the way to Tybee Island from Savannah, GA. After arriving at the location, I photographed various scenes for about a half hour before ultimately deciding it wasn't as photogenic as I had thought (or maybe my creative skills simply weren't doing it justice on that day). With my tail between my legs, I headed home.

However, on my return trip I spotted an interesting dock area to my right on the other side of the bridge that crosses the Wilmington River. After turning off the main road, I worked my way back to the dock and found that it was a public park – W.E. Honey Park, to be exact – and the dock I had seen from the bridge was easily accessible.

I parked and attached the EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM to the EOS 7D to allow for a wide range of framing opportunities from the dock. I also attached a B+W Circular Polarizer to the lens to see how it might impact the image. After several attempts to capture the bridge as seen from the dock, I turned around to photograph a small river winding its way through the marsh with lots of clouds near the tree-lined horizon. After returning to my vehicle, I realized that my normal custom white balance may not be optimal with the circular polarizer attached. As such, I pulled out my X-Rite ColorChecker Passport and photographed its white balance target in direct sunlight with the CPOL attached for color correction purposes in post processing.

As I do with all my images captured in IR, I set the white balance in Digital Photo Professional and then exported a TIFF into Photoshop CC. There, I view the image a few different ways to see which post processing technique I feel best suits the scene.

Here's what the image looked like straight out of the camera with only an Auto Levels applied:

While I find that non red/blue channel flipped images may work well for some portraits, I rarely find the nearly straight out of camera approach well suited for landscapes.

Let's try another technique. Below I've applied Auto Levels, swapped the red and blue color channels and desaturated the yellow color of the foliage.

The above represents a more typical IR photo, albeit with blue color in the sky and in the water. While this image looks much better than the straight out of camera example, I decided to leave the Yellow channel untouched in the final image above so that there was a clear separation between the clouds and the tree line. The circular polraizer that was used seemed to create an even more intense blue in the scene compared to images taken without the filter in place.

I've been really happy having an IR-converted camera in my kit these past few months. It's been a great investment for me and a fitting use for a DSLR which would have seen little use after upgrading to 7D Mark II. And the great thing about the Super Color IR sensor option, in particular, is that I gain great flexibility in creating multiple image styles from the same capture.

Ready to learn more about infrared camera conversions? Take a look at our Infrared Camera Conversion by LifePixel Review.