First attempt.

[IMG]http://i670.photobucket.com/albums/vv67/alasdairdouglas/irmonopb.jpg[/IMG]

First try at posting an image and my first Infra Red experiment.
This is where I live, picture taken on a Sunday morning and as you can see, the frenzied bustle of place is almost intolerable.

That sort of hustle and bustle I could put up with. You are really lucky waking up to that view.

Interesting shot, so how did you get it?

Hello Hardgravity, I used a Hoya R72 filter, a 30 second exposure at f9.5 and then fiddled with the saturation and contrast of the (naturally, very red) image in Faststone. Not the right way of going about it, , certainly, but I think the effect suits the harsh landscape.

Here's another one.
[IMG]http://i670.photobucket.com/albums/vv67/alasdairdouglas/Gress3pb.jpg[/IMG]

Taken at a different time of day, and I forgot to black out the viewfinder for most of this session, but this shot didn't suffer. There's a fair bit of bracketing involved and the light needs to be right, but it's... different!

Great landscapes, but for IR the K10D is unfortunately not as good as the *istDS. The camera filters out IR light more aggressively and doesn't give you a fair chance!

The highloghts (light areas) are a bit grey and I would think an increase in contrast is really needed here.

Hope that helps!

I dabbled with IR but could never really get on with it since the exposure times are so long with modern DSLR's. As John has mentioned, the earlier Pentax DSLR's are better for IR work.

One point though, about blacking out the viewfinder. I think this is only necessary for metering, not the actual exposure. When the mirror is up, it has a black opaque cover on it's underside. I doubt any light will pass through to the sensor.

It's possibly the K10D's efficiency at filtering out IR which limits the contrast. If I remember rightly, that was as far as I could push it without making the sky look strangely grainy: an effect visible in the first shot. It might be worth another go but with more sophisticated software this time!

Many thanks,

Al

Interesting technique, and it seems to work.

Just for your reading I posted this a while ago. Thanks to everybody on here I know which body to use when I get around to trying something like yours.

Hi Mannesty, I too thought the viewfinder-covering issue only affected metering, but some of the initial shots had pronounced banding on them which I put down to light leaking in. There may well have been a different cause though.

Good luck HG, and thanks for the link.

Al

Good thought, but banding is usually most noticeable in noisy shadow areas of an image, IE: Not enough light, rather than too much (getting in through the VF).

That's a very good point. Hmm.
I should have thought about it a bit more, really.

Ta,

Al.