The Infrared Secret Garden

Just playing with an R72 infrared filter and was blown away by how long the exposures were.

Prefocused the camera and took a meter reading at F13 (because infrared falls onto the sensor at a slightly different plain to normal light, so if a large aperture is used it may be out of focus) and was given a shutter speed of 0.8 sec. Switched the camera to full manual and upped the exposure time by several stops and took a photograph which came out completely black?

Took several further photographs extending the exposure period and finally got the result I was after at 25 seconds.

After duplicating the layer and adding Gaussian blur I set it as soft light to allow some of the sharpness through. I created a saturation/colour adjustment layer and removed a lot of the saturation to give me an almost black and white photograph and then adding a little colour so it was almost sepia.

Reduced noise using Noise Ninja, reduced the image size to 800 on the longest edge and then sharpened using the unsharp mask.

This is a first attempt at infrared photography so please be gentle.