Went out to check the chickens just now and got to wondering how things would look with infrared. So I went in and got my little old IR converted lumix and went back out to get these two pics:
How does infrared work? I would imagine that things that are warmer would be redder, so it seems strange to me that the sky is red and the trees aren't.
You could probably get a better explanation somewhere else but the way I understand it is in common infrared photography we are dealing with the "near infrared" colors - not the far infrared that is heat. Though there are special infrared cameras that can measure heat and temperature. My camera is not specialized in that way. It just sees the infrared color that is right beside red in our visible color spectrum. The colors of the sky and greenery are determined in the camera by the white balance you set. I have my camera's white balance set so green plants show up as white or neutral gray. Then the sky just shows up as brown in that case.
Interesting! What happens to the colors if you set the white balance to... white? Sorry if that's an ignorant question, i don't know anything about photography.
The white balance has to do with the source of light: sunny day or shade, or different kinds of lightbulbs. With a normal camera you might be setting your custom white balance by pointing you camera at a neutral gray card and setting it for the type of light from that. Most the time with my IR camera I set the white balance by pointing it at greenery instead. If I had used a gray card to get the white balance the whole picture would look very pink. I'm not very good at explaining all this stuff. I just know what I need to do to get certain kinds of pictures from the camera.
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How fun it must be to play around with the camera setting while you do this.
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