High praise, indeed!
Thanks, Jeff.
Yes, that's correct. Apart from basic white balancing, color/curves adjustments, color channels are all in the "right" place out of camera.
The main difficulty is that since the filter passes IR and some visible light, it's challenging to find lenses where these two frequency ranges focus close enough together. I haven't found a wide angle lens that performs well enough. (Although my search has been limited to the ones I have on my shelf.) Is there such thing as a wide angle superachromat? I've settled on using an old Nikkor 55/3.5 micro for being close enough at f/11 and having good manual focus feel, stitching for wider views. I'd love to find a usable ~35mm.
Last edited by jon.oman; 16-Aug-2021 at 09:55. Reason: Typo
Median-blending is an essential part of my nighttime photography workflow, because the extra headroom it provides allows me to tease more details from the shadow areas without having to increase exposure in the highlight areas.
It also works very well for daylight IR photography, too. Because it allows me to slightly but meaningfully expand the DR capability of the APS-C format camera I use to better capture the wide range of contrast present when photographing scenes under the midday desert sun.
And not only does it get rid of tourists, but it also removes light trails from airplanes, planets, and stars in the sky and often adds a nice bit of motion blur to tree leaves and clouds, too.
While it does add time and/or complication to my photographic process, it's nevertheless an indispensable tool in my chest...
I think it's more of a design decision, this use being outside of it's intended application. Newer, more highly corrected lenses might work better, assuming they don't fail on other characteristics (hot spot)?
I chose this lens (Nikkor 55/3.5 micro pre-ai) because:
a) I already had it, b) no hot spot, c) good enough ir-visible f/11 focus at distance, and d) better manual focus than other AF lenses I have.
No, it's a lens property - how many wavelengths it was designed it to focus simultaneously.
Here's a Wikipedia diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superachromat
I'd be curious to see how the new Voigtlander 35mm APO-Lanthar works, but they won't work on a Nikon DSLR (Sony E mount).
We had some nice clouds today, and so I went to a high location and took a bunch of photos with many of my lenses, both regular color photos and IR ones. I did a few things different. First, I changed the ISO from my normal 100 to 800, and I switched the picture mode to 'monchrome'. The raw files are still in color, but the image on the rear LCD becomes bw. These changes made my exposure times much faster, and the image on the rear screen was easier to view in bw instead of in red. The files did have more noise than my ISO 100 ones, but it wasn't too bad.
“You often feel tired, not because you've done too much, but because you've done too little of what sparks a light in you.”
― Alexander Den Heijer, Nothing You Don't Already Know
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