I really like this shot and I hope you guys do too. This is my first real outting with infrared. I played around in the back yard to learn how to do interesting post-processing work on the originals. This is at the Beringer Brothers Winery up in Napa, CA. If you've got to go to a wedding, might as well go up early and enjoy the valley. I must admit, I am quite done with tasting wine for a while. Post process steps at the bottom.
With the purchase of my new baby, the D300, I almost sold my D70 to my brother. But then I found out that each generation of Nikon does a greater job than the last of filtering out infrared. Boo. Turns out that the D70 will take a Hoya R72 filter in ISO 640 and let you do hand-held infrared. Of course, you can't see about anything through the lens (only the brightest of red end of visible light) so I used my D300 as reference, then shot numerous guesses with the D70.
I shot in RAW format, let the camera auto-white ballance and auto-focus. Import into Photoshop CS4, choose the new white balance to be the brightest portion of what I know should be green (typically ended up being temperature of 2000, tint around -40 to -50), and chose Auto for the exposure setting. Once in PS, I use the channel mixer to swap red and blue (in red channel set red to 0 and blue to 100; vice versa in blue channel). Then I set a levels layer and use auto if it looks about what I want it to be. Finally, to remove the red hue from the now-almost-white leaves, I use a hue/sat layer and select out a small range of magenta to desaturate a little. This grabs a little from the sky often so I'm careful to limit how wide the color range affected is and also bump the saturation up in the blue range. In this photo, I also created a curves layer for contrast and another hue/sat layer masked to pull some of the blue tint out of the building roof and minor spots. Cropped and uploaded. Hope this info helps anyone.
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A solid image that is crisp, sharp and properly framed and composed - a technical success in every way. From an artistic standpoint, it has significant impact being richly colored with excellant detail. This image would have worked as a black and white as well as infrared. A perfect demonstration of the power of properly controlled light and focus. A top ten image and a very strong contender for a ribbon. Well done.
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