Outdoor Photographer – September 2019

reflected in the marshy pools of the Rio
Grande Valley. I took the photograph
handheld, braced on the top of my car,
with a Nikon 70-200mm ƒ/4 and 1.4x
teleconverter. The lens was zoomed all
the way in, giving me an effective focal
length of 280mm that helped create the
picture’s flat, “compressed” appearance.
I kept the shutter speed high enough
(1/250 sec.) to reasonably freeze the red-
winged blackbirds flying in front of the
mountains and stopped down to ƒ/13 to
make sure everything was sharp from
front to back.
The trees on the mountains, and, to a
lesser extent, the brush surrounding the
water, have the typical blue-green (cyan)
color that digital infrared capture renders
foliage. It was a little too blue for my taste,
so I altered it in Photoshop to make it
greener and therefore natural, though I
didn’t take it all the way. Instead of using
saturation sliders to do this, I went into
the Selective Color control, increasing the
yellow in the image’s blues and reducing
magenta in the image’s greens, among a
few other adjustments. Selective Color

isn’t a control typically used much by

photographers but is one I’ve found useful

for subtle tweaking of color with infrared.

Small Pond At Dusk,

Stamford, Connecticut

Infrared is usually considered a bright-

light medium that’s best in direct sun,

which contains a lot of the invisible

infrared radiation that produces the

distinctive effects. Digital infrared has

taught me that there’s often light—or

infrared wavelengths, anyway—in the

dark. In this case, the only direct light

on the pond was from dusk, after the

sun had dropped below the horizon

behind the trees the water reflects. Even

the sunset’s light was dimming. My

eyes could see the reflection, which

makes up the entirety of this image,

but I wasn’t convinced that the camera

would pick up much of anything.

I didn’t want to deal with the dim light by

using a large aperture, a high ISO or both.

I wanted enough depth of field to maintain

sharpness in both the leaves floating in the

water and the reflection of the trees in the

Opposite: Tree At Sunrise, Bosque

Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge

Above: Fairy Stone State Park,

Virginia

outdoorphotographer.com September 2019 55