[Pavel]

Dear friends, Hearing your recommendations to abandon (postpone or consider options) fisheye or telephoto and think instead of IR photography got me thinking and experimenting a bit. NIK software offers a customizable IR filter. I experimented with it on several of my photos and I posted a photo where I blended BW with faw IR on flickr.

Now here is my question: As far as I could tell, the filter added some grain (you can add more or remove the grain effect) and increased sensitivity wherever image showed red, yellow and green and reduced sensitivity wherever there was blue or purple or magenta. I recognize that IR operates at a different wavelength than red, yellow and green, but i wonder whether the actual effect of using IR creates an image very similar to that I observed with NIK. In the end, IR radiation has to be mapped into visible spectrum for us to see it. If the sensor maps it into red yellow and green, than using software could emulate the effect fairly well I think. I wonder whether those of you that are experienced with IR ever tried to reproduce the effect with regular camera & filter. Also if you happen to have an identical image taken both as IR and color, I would be grateful if you could make a low res small version available to me for comparison. I will play with it in NIK a bit and I will be curious if we could see a difference.

I will be grateful for any comments. Basically, I am thinking that the easiest way to do IR is in software, if you can reproduce that aspect of IR, which makes it so special. Forgive me if this is a rant. I am not against IR, I just do not know enough about it and i wish to learn.

Pavel