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February 3, 2025

Behind the Image Weekly - Night Vision

Night Vision-110px.jpgBehind the Image - Night Vision by David Soderlund (DaveSoderlund)

This photograph is from a IR photography workshop in Joshua Tree National Park led by Penelope Taylor. One of her specialties is night (actually, very early morning) IR photography of the desert under moonlight. Accordingly, we were on the road into the park by 4:30 am for three consecutive days.

Photographing the desert under moonlight was extremely challenging because it is impossible to see what you are shooting through the camera. Penelope would say "There's a composition over there" and we'd set up our tripods, choose an arbitrary (long) exposure, shoot, and then review the image to figure out what we'd actually photographed. Achieving some sort of acceptable composition was an iterative process of shooting, reviewing, and changing the camera position, focal length, and settings -- all while hoping that the pre-set manual focus of the lens was accurate. Needless to say, "keepers" were few and far between. By the time this photograph was taken (not long before sunrise) the stars had faded and there was enough light to see, more or less, what I was doing.

Here is the original image, with minimal processing in Lightroom: application of a custom camera profile to achieve correct white balance; adjustments to highlights (set to 0) and shadows (set to 100); and small amounts of clarity and dehaze.

Z5 (720nm IR), Nikkor Z 24-70mm f/4 s @ 27mm, ISO 200, f/11, 1/15 sec.
raw-Night Vision-800px.jpg

I developed the image using a Photoshop workflow taught by Penelope during the workshop, which involves three successive adjustment layers: (1) Channel Mixer (red and blue channel swap); (2) Black & White (no adjustments to this layer at this point); and (3) Gradient Map (selecting "Classic" under Method and "Black and White" from the Basic options under the gradient pull-down menu). After that, I returned to the Black & White layer to make minor adjustments using the color sliders. (This is also part of my basic B&W workflow in Lightroom for both visible light and IR images.)

After these Photoshop adjustments I returned the image to Lightroom for further processing. I applied a tone curve to increase contrast and cropped the image to a square format (the left side of the image was boring!). To finish the image I applied two masks: (1) Select Sky (reduced Exposure, boosted Whites, added Clarity); (2) Radial Gradient on the large foreground rock formation (increased Highlights and Texture). The final touches were selective sharpening and a slight vignette. Here's the final image:

Night Vision-800px.jpg

Posted by dm1dave at 2:00 AM