Steam Trains in IR

Just spent a rainy few days in Dartmouth. This morning was lovely and sunny, but that was admired from the car on the way home...

In walking around we followed a footpath alongside the railway out of Kingswear Station, and captured the passing of a couple of different steam engines. The problem here is that the trains are very close indeed, since the footpath is literally between the line and the drop to the water. I haven't tried trains before - when you are that close there is almost no time to get the shots!

Enjoy!

A longer shot:



Kit 18-55 at 33mm, 1/125th at f/6.7 ISO 200.


A different engine:



Kit 18-55 at 18mm, 1/350th at f/6.7 ISO 400.


Cutting it a bit fine - the shot after this shows just the side of the wheels:



Sigma 10-20 at 17mm, 1/180th at f/6.7 ISO 400.


Standing still- makes life easier:



Sigma 10-20 at 20mm, 1/125th at f/6.7 ISO 400.

All on the modified GX1L.

These are great, and the IR certainly gives a new perspective on loco shots esp. when you've got trees in the background.

#1 is a knockout - stunning composition.

They're very good indeed Richard. You say you haven't done trains before, well these look expert, and the IR treatment suits them fine.
David

A fantastic set of images there. Interestingly, it is not immediately apparent that they they IR, just nice contrasty B&W.

They get the thumbs up from me too, great set.

I would like to hear a bit about the pp as you have obviously gone to a lot of trouble.

A++ from me especially #1. Great IR gallery btw

I think the lack of IR 'glow' to the trees is because the weather was very dull indeed, although the trees are still brighter than they would be otherwise.

Regarding the post processing, this is the workflow:

RAW images are viewed in Bibble and exposure corrected if necessary. Most of these had to be pulled up about a stop.

Selected images are exported to Photoshop, still with reddish false colours.

In PS I use Topaz Adjust to manipulate the contrast of the details and to add punch to the false colour, then that version gets converted to mono so that the red slider in the channel mixer can be used to govern the amount of 'IR-ness'. That works particularly well on blue sky and clouds, both of which were absent here. The settings I use for Adjust also give a larger dynamic range, for example the dark areas under the engine in the last one are lost in the original, while the 'after' version has a nice glint of steely things.

Very reminiscent of an engine on a winters morning where all but the engine are glistening with hoar frost.

Absolute magic - great stuff.


Can you shoot IR in the dark, or at least very low light. Or does there need to be visible light as well (I appreciate you need to see what you're doing)

Bernard

Some super sharp and contrasty images.
The IR certainly gives them something extra too.
#1 is my favourite.

Great pictures.

Followed your thread about the camera modifications, well done.

I went through a few rolls of infrared Kodak slide film more than 30 years ago, I remember the advice was to keep it wrapped in tin-foil when not in the camera. Your system seems easier

One question, to the more educated than me, if the infrared part of the spectrum picks up radiated 'heat', I would have thought that this would be shown in the image as different shades in parts of the train, i.e. the smoke stack, because it is hot, would be a different shade, ( lighter ), than the buffers ?

If I'm being stupid let me know, maybe my experience with the IR film was different.

I remember taking pictures of someone's arm, and the blood vessels stood out in infrared, because they were warmer than the surrounding skin.

May try and dig out a few of the old slide's and let you see them.

p.s. I still think the images are 10 out of 10

It does need light, but sometimes the ratio of IR to visible light can be very different. For example, in bright sunlight the exposure for IR might need to be given +1 or +2 stops compensation. In the deep shade of woodland the IR exposure might need to be reduced by a similar amount since there is generally a lot of IR scattered from the foliage.

It would be possible to shoot IR in the dark with an IR-rich light source or a flashgun with an IR filter, but generally that's best left to security cameras and night sights.

This camera is sensitive to 'near-infrared', so heat is swamped by the visible part of the spectrum. A thermal imager would do it of course, but that's sensitive to much longer wavelengths. As for the veins, I think that's partly because the skin is fairly transparent to near-IR - you see features below the surface.

Thank you, Richard.

You have expanded my knowledge.

I still think the images are superb, so therefore I hate you

I overlooked one - this one comes immediately before the third one above:



Sigma 10-20 at 17mm, 1/250th at f/6.7 ISO 400.

Incidentally, most of these were composed initially without the train, then I had to wait for it to take up the right place in the frame. That was the tricky part, being close up and fast the 'right moment' is quite hard to judge, and a steam engine pulling hard is quite intimidating when only about 5 feet away

Cracking set of pics I would love to try this style but sadly dont have ps or topaz or the know how .
Ian