Photography Experiments

Here are some things I've been playing around with my camera lately:

Infrared Photography:
Inspired by this video. I have two infrared filters--one for my 50mm portrait lens which appears to work well, and one for my 17 - 70mm lens which does NOT appear to work well. Or at least, it doesn't really work the way I expected it too. I've read that the best way to capture infrared is to convert your camera--take out the IR blocking filter inside the camera and replace it with one that blocks visible light instead. I can't do that with my new DSLR, but I do have an old powershot lying around with nothing better to do...

This is an attempt at false color. Foliage is supposed to turn white in IR, so I don't know what happened here..	This one was taken with the portrait lens. Green tree turned pure white (until I messed with it in Photoshop), as expected.
Taken with weird IR filter, but I think it still turned out cool.

Astrophotography:
Haven't had much success with this one, but the photos on this website as well as this one have inspired me to try. I think the main problem is there is just too much light to really see the sky at night. I am planning on hunting down skies not polluted with light this summer. My goal is to see the Milky Way, and maybe take a time lapse video of it, because those are about the coolest ever. I got a little obsessed with Orion constellation the weekend I took these shots, because it was so clear in the sky. I also tried looking at the stars through a pair of Dad's binoculars, and I was excited to see the faint blue glow around the Orion Nebula. Also featured is Jupiter!

Time Lapse Videos:
I've seen a lot of really cool videos like this lately, especially ones taken in space or of the night sky. Also saw one where this guy traveled from Germany to China for a year and made a video showing the growth of his beard. This video is a collection of everything I've tried so far, and it's not especially exciting or inspiring. It doesn't even have any music. It's just an experiment. In the video, the first 30 seconds are of clouds outside Mom and Dad's house. The rest of the video involves our high adventure yesterday up in the mountains. Dad has this campground with a spring that he LOVES and he and Mom bought a truck so (among other things) they could go up there together. So we went up and had a nice little picnic. The trip to and from the camp site was...bumpy. :)

And that's what I've been up to on and off lately. I'm counting down the days (7 more) and filling up my summer with trips galore and a possible internship at a software company. Woo!!!