I think the two most important things about taking infrared pictures are, you have to choose your subjects well or it will just look like a black and white picture. And you have to be prepared to work on an infrared picture in your photo editing software Infrared pictures HAVE to be worked on in a photo editing software, there's simply no way around it. An infrared picture does not come out of the camera ready to use, it MUST be turned into an infrared picture. Now I don't have the ability or the inclination to go through the steps it takes to turn that red picture into a really pretty infrared picture, all I can tell you is it's Juju Magic that no one is capable of understanding let alone explaining. But there is a simple shortcut that will get you started, simply open your hideous red picture in your photo editing software, and turn the saturation all the way down to zero. This will give you a starting point. Most things look about the same if you take an infrared picture of them so you have to find things that are going to look different in infrared, the main things that can look different are the sky and green plants. And the green plants are what gives a picture that signature white infrared look, and the more chlorophyll in a plant the whiter it looks. I think the best plant to take an infrared picture of is a palm tree, and there's a couple of reasons. The palm tree has a lot of chlorophyll so it looks very white, and being a palm tree people don't expect it to be white because they generally don't live in places where it snows, so they give a very dramatic effect. If you take a picture of a lawn it just looks like grass with some snow on it which isn't very dramatic. Basically there are two types of infrared pictures, regular infrared, and false color infrared. Regular infrared is usually what you get when you desaturate the colors in the picture so that the picture has nothing but black, white, and grays. False color infrared is what you get when you learn the Juju Magic way of converting an infrared picture. And there's a lot written about it on the Internet. That's really about it, there's no right way or wrong way to develop an infrared picture, it's mostly a lot of trial and error making various adjustments in your photo editing software until the picture looks the way you want it to. To me the big thing is the subjects. Last winter when I was in the Arizona desert I tried a little bit of infrared photography but was disappointed in the way most of the pictures came out, it seems like there's just not very much chlorophyll running around in the desert. But who knows, maybe I never pointed the camera in the right direction, or took an infrared picture of the right thing. I haven't given up on the desert yet and when I leave here I will be in some Texas desert areas so I'll try some infrared there and see how it works. theboondork
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