Deep dark water, infra-red photography

Nikon D90 with IR720 Infra-red filter on a 50mm f1.4 lens
Castlecomer discovery park, County Kilkenny
Landscape photography: Nigel Borrington

One reason I truly love monochrome images is for the contrast range that can be achieved, no where is this more possible than when attaching an IR720 filter on to a lens.

This filter only lets in Infra-red light and excludes any other light wavelength, Thus anything that is emitting IR light will be recorded in light tones and any other area of the image will appear dark a deep, deep black.

It is this very high contrast that is so hard to achieve in photography, without post processing software. Using an IR720 filter however can produce this effect in images right out of the camera and they just look wonderful.

You do have some issues to over come however, you need to pre-focus and lock the focus before attaching the filter to the lens. You need long exposures and you need to experiment with the correct selection of setting for this by taking many shots as you will not truly be able to see the results until you get home.

You can get a camera completely converted to Infra-red, but this is expensive and may not always work i.e. the focusing system fails to work and some sensors produce better results than others.