Virginia Lake - Whanganui

 Virginia Lake in Autumn is a beautiful place to spend a few hours. Warm sunshine on your back, autumn colours adorning the trees. To top it all off, Les had found time in his weekend to join me for the afternoon walk. But as we began our walk, the clouds filled in, and that beautiful sunshine became a more fleeting prospect. That wasn't part of the plan! The weather forecast had promised broken cloud.   

With the unconverted 6D, the lower light levels made live view focusing a lot more challenging. So the change of light would mean a change in approach. Actually it was an idea I had been considering anyway so in some ways I suppose it was a great time to test it. What was the new approach? Remove the filter from the lens, explore, compose, focus (using the infrared mark), then reattach the filter and photograph. This approach will take more time, but on the other side it is like taking your camera off a tripod to compose the next shot, it allows you to be more intentional.  

Of course infrared photography will not render the scene you see in front of you. That is the best part of infrared photography, its ability to reveal the surprising. Light snobs beware, flat mid day light can yield surprising results. In normal light photography, we are hunting the best light, the unusual, the dramatic. Why are we doing that, I think it is in part, because we have seen it in every other light so often. We are looking for new and interesting. But in infrared, everything is new. Swathes of green foliage in normal light, turn into a collage of colours, tones and textures in infrared.

The image above appears to be captured in a wintry frost, cold and silent. But instead it is a infrared image, processed in Adobe Lightroom and then channel swapped in Photoshop. For the photographers, this image is made up of 6 exposures, each of images were captured with the settings of ISO 400, the aperture was F8 and shutter speed was 30 sec's. These images were then combined to make a single exposure which was effectively three minutes long. This longer exposure turns the flowing river into something that looks very calm and peaceful.

This is the first of a few images from this walk around the lake, more will be coming in the next few blog posts. If you have a question, leave it in the comments.


  

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Creative Advantages Using Denoise in Adobe Lightroom

Floating

Exploring New Tools - Magic Lantern