Infra Red experiments with the Sony RX100 / Hoya R72 filter

Infra Red experiments with the Sony RX100 / Hoya R72 filter

Having experimented with many settings, I’ve decide to stick to shooting RAW, with a custom white balance. In the time I’ve been spending with this combination, I’ve been getting some very interesting results (IMO !), but the camera and the IR filter combination together can produce the ‘mysterious magenta centre spot‘. I can’t pinpoint this down to a specific combination of settings. It’s really a bit hit and miss, sometimes it’s not present at all, other times very present.

Here’s a jpg of a RAW file straight from camera (with pronounced magenta spot) Before processing

 

Here’s the processed version (see below for explanation)

 

The magenta spot kind of forced me into looking at black and white processing, primarily. I came across a tip on the B+W site IR filter site, regarding converting the image into ‘Lab color’ mode and converting the ‘lightness’ channel to grayscale, I found this yielded interesting results. When I started looking at IR in general, I was very disappointed when my images looked nothing like a lot of examples I’d seen online, I tried the channel mixer settings that most people do and a few other things too. I’ve got more to learn indeed !

Here’s a selection of assorted recent shots (mid July)