Oak Tree with Spanish Moss in IR

by Sean Setters

As I mentioned in our Infrared Camera Conversion Review, having an infrared camera at hand greatly increases the "great light" portion of the day. It's well known that golden hour (shortly after sunrise and just before sunset) provides the greatest opportunities for capturing scenes with beautiful, interesting and/or compelling light in traditional photography. Typical landscape scenes don't as good in the middle of the day. And since there are a lot more hours in the day that aren't golden hours, that presents a bit of a problem from an inspiration standpoint for landscape photographers.

As landscapes captured in IR typically look best with a lot of hard, midday sun, getting an IR-converted DSLR can provide ample opportunities to capture beautiful landscapes with the sun right overhead.

Sometimes I'll simply grab my Super Color IR-converted EOS 7D and EF-S 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 IS STM and/or EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM and walk around my neighborhood to see what piques my interest. Typically speaking, my neighborhood isn't very inspiring from a landscape photography perspective. However, there are a few spots nearby that tend to draw my eye. This large oak tree in the middle of a field is one of them.

When it comes to IR landscapes, I typically set my camera to aperture priority (Av) mode at f/8, ISO 100 and let the camera choose the shutter speed (dialing in exposure comensation if needed). Considering that IR landscapes are typically captured at times with an abundance of ambient light available, using f/8 allows me to achieve near maximum sharpness (though the setting is just slightly above the camera's diffraction limited aperture, or DLA) while typically keeping everything in focus (assuming the point of focus exceeds the hyperfocal distance for the situation).

For the shot above, I used the EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM and the exposure settings were f/8, 1/160 second and ISO 100.

I first inverted the red and blue color channels in post processing and then desaturated the yellow hues to achieve the traditional IR white foliage look while maintaining the blue color captured by the Super Color IR sensor. Click on the image above for access to a higher resolution version.

Learn more about infrared photography and IR conversions in our Infrared Camera Conversion by LifePixel Review.