Another neat thing about IR is that you can see where a leaf is damaged and see what is causing the damage.

To be fair, you can do this in visible light too, but the bugs aren’t quite so cute that way.

One downside of shooting with a special camera is that neat scenes, like when one great blue heron infringes on the territory of another, look rather odd. Still, I’m glad to have seen it.

Sometimes infrared makes things look extremely different. When I am shooting my new camera, everything looks weird. Due to the oddities of how digital IR works, all the reds and blues are “flipped” from what you (usually) want. This results in bright red skies which can be very distracting. However, you can still see the differences. In this photo, for example, I could tell right away that there was something interesting about those seed pods because, outside of the camera, they are the exact same brown as the ground and the leaf.

Sometimes I just hold the camera up to my eye and walk around, just so I can see things differently.

Then again, sometimes you see something that wouldn’t be nearly as interesting in visible light.

The problem with infrared, of course, is sometimes you see something awesome that would have looked better in human-visible light.

So why am I doing this? Well, one reason is that some animals are bothered by flash. This photo was taken with an infrared flashlight in one hand and the camera in the other. It’s not easy (and surprisingly tiring), but when it works, the camera can lock on and you get a photo like this in a way that the animal never sees any additional light.

This isn’t such a big deal for insects like this, but it matters a lot for nesting reptiles and birds as well as foraging mammals.

When it works, though, you can get images like this.

See how different wavelengths of light are reflected directly (the trees across the lake) and indirectly (the trees on my side of the lake that are being back-lit).

You can also deal with hotspots through colour shifting, like here. However, it’s better to just identify which lenses are and aren’t reliable so you can just do invisible light photography with lenses you can trust.

So I finally took the leap and converted my backup camera to infrared. Unlike my previous infrared camera, this one records a much larger range of wavelengths so it’s faster and allows me to a “false” colour view. The problem, however, is that some lenses apparently have a “hot spot” in which the center of the sensor collects more infrared light than the rest so you get colour shifting.

It works out OK when you can line it up with a lens flare.