Budapest - IR IX (Budapest Noir)

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2013.10.19, Fisherman's Bastion, Budapest, Hungary.

Nikon D90-IR - 10-24 @ 11mm - f/8 - 202,1 sec - iso 200 - B+W 093 - Lee Big Stopper - NEF - Capture NX 2.2.6 - PS/CS6

I had a day off in Budapest (doesn't happen too often, it was the 2nd or 3rd time in a year) but the weather was not very friendly. Gloomy clouds all over the sky, lots of wind, no sunshine. I realised that the visible light spectrum was useless for the themes I was going after, therefore I grabbed my infrared camera, upped the contrast and sharpness by using an additional 830nm filter on the front lens.

The dynamic range of IR shots is amazing, I needed no gradient filters or any other DR-increasing methods even in this gloomy setup, I still had 1-2 stops in both the highlights and the shadows to work with in the photos.

Still, with all the tourists around it was a pain to photograph. Then came the idea of the Lee Big Stopper (10 stop glass ND filter). I've never tried it in IR before. My previous 10stop ND filter (the B+W 110) was not very IR-friendly, it gave a certain soft focus to the images. However, the Lee turned to be perfectly usable in IR - no softening, no haze, just the regular coma that 10 stop filters add to images. It almost left the black and white WB intact, it adds a slight warm tone to the image as you see here (I decided to keep the out of camera tone as I liked it better than pure black and white).

The only problem was that from 1/20 sec normal shutter speed it sends the camera into the 2-4 minutes exposure time range. However, in situations like this, this is not a drawback, but a great plus - it takes out the crowd from the shots, leaving only haunting ghosts here and there...

Surprisingly, noise is not a real problem - with the resulting monochrome images, color noise is just not there, while luminance noise is very well controlled, actually no noise reduction was needed.

More photos from the Fisherman's Bastion:





You can find the whole series and even more infrared shots from me here!

Check out the rest of my gallery!

_{Disclaimer: This photograph is not stock. You are not allowed to use my work in any way.}