Travels with an Infrared Camera

Today’s Post by Mark Toal

“There are two kinds of people in the world, observers and non-observers…”― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

I’ve been traveling a lot for work lately and shooting more with my infrared converted Lumix GX7. Joe and I are both lovers of Infrared photography and had our cameras converted by Lifepixel. The images below are from a Lumix GX7 that had the Standard Color IR Filter (720nm) conversion.

The harsh light you can encounter this time of year combined with long hours of sunlight can make photography difficult unless you get up very early or stay up late to catch interesting light and shadows. Fortunately Infrared loves mid-day light and harsh light.

When shooting Infrared, I’ve tried different focal length lenses but I always come back to the 7-14mm lens that I usually shoot at 7mm to get an extreme affect especially with architecture.

If you’ve ever been to Las Vegas you know how harsh the sunlight is from just after sunrise to very late in the day. This photo from a trip to Las Vegas was taken in mid-afternoon. The photo of the Denver Art Museum was taken at mid-day again with the 7-14mm lens.

The RAW infrared image files that comes out of my camera tends to look a little blue and flat in contrast which gives me a great starting point to convert it to black and white and adjust the contrast using the now free Silver Efex Pro or Aurora HDR software.

Tip: If you want to save time and maybe a few bucks when having your camera converted to infrared, please use the coupon code “farace” when ordering a conversion from LifePixel .