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Today, Peter and I went to Messenger Woods. Normally this is the short time of year where this particular forest floor is covered with wildflowers. Unfortunately, because of the weird cold weather, they have not come in yet. It was a nice hike, but a bit of a dud morning for pictures. We found a really ancient Hamms beer can, which proved to be the day’s most interesting subject. We plan on going back in a few weeks to try to catch the flowers.

I went back to Arrowhead Lake yesterday. Some of the locations in these images might look familiar. I walked around for around 2.5 hours. As I was heading back to the car, I came across a large herd of deer. I got some shots off, and tried to get closer. They all took off except for one. This young deer let me get really close before she trotted slowly off.

This was the first time I carried 2 cameras on my walk. I had my older body with a wide lens and infrared filter, and my newer body with my big zoom lens. I was also carrying a tripod strapped on my back. It sounds like a lot, but it really wasn’t so bad!

In this gallery, I experimented with some rather severe cropping and color/exposure adjustments. The first 3 pictures in the gallery are infrared images.

Today, I posted 2 new galleries. These are a bit different from previous, as the images in them have been edited. I have done cropping, exposure adjustments, sharpening, etc. As time goes on, I expect this to become the norm.

The first gallery contains some more infrared photos. They’re not my favorite pictures; I considered this outing more of a proof of concept than anything else. They were all handheld or monopod mounted. I used the “liveview” feature on my camera to frame the shots. Mastering infrared photography will take some time, but these at least show some possibilities.

The second gallery was just a walk in the park. I’m still working on handholding my heavy 50-200mm lens.

I find infrared photography fascinating. These are my first experiments. Because I get home after dark, I was a little limited in my subject matter. The only post processing done was a little noise reduction and some minor sharpening for the web.