Budapest - IR XI (Budapest Noir)

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2013.10.19, Fisherman's Bastion, Budapest, Hungary.

Nikon D90-IR - 10-24 @ 14 mm - f/8 - 163,6 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 of it 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 infrared 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.}