I’d heard of this before – the lawsuit about the Miles Davis photo had made the rounds in the photography news feeds.

He refers to the “Everything is a remix” series of videos I’ve mentioned before.

Also – living close to it but never having visited I thought that Nunhead Cemetery would be a good spot – Graveyards always look good in IR.

If you’re not interested in techie photography ramble and explanation – just jump to the end to see my photos.

Equipment

Equipment used (and had already):

• Nikon D800
• Nikon 24-70mm
• Cokin P-series filter holder + 77mm adapter
• Cokin P-series IR filter (P007)
• Remote shutter release (3rd party wired from eBay)
• Tripod

The problem with trying to shoot Infrared with standard D-SLRs is that in front of the sensor they have a IR/Low-pass filter. Although it doesn’t block ALL IR  light – it blocks much of it.  So if you’re not going to go to the effort/expense of converting a camera and taking this out – you need to use an IR filter, which only allws IR and near-IR light in, and have a fairly extended exposure time.

There are numerous filters on the market – I just happen to have a Cokin P-series filter. I bought this a while ago as the advantage of Cokin filters is that you buy adapter rings for the holder and so you can use the filters (panes of glass) for different sized lenses – thus saving on the expense of buying multiple filters. At the time I invested in this system Cokin were only doing A and P-series filters – A being small and P larger in size. They now also have Z and X series which are even larger. P-series are rated up to 82mm – but there are issues when shooting wide-angle lenses.

Reading up online it seems that the Cokin filter isn’t the best of the IR filters available commercially – but it’s the one I have. Sometimes they’re rated in terms of light frequency they will block.

Setup

So – I have a D-SLR with a filter to cut out IR wavelengths, and in front of it I have a filter to only allow IR in. This means that exposure times need to be quite long to get enough IR light to give a decent exposure – hence using a tripod and remote shutter release to reduce/stop any camera movement.

I found that when shooting wide-angle alas the Cokin filter holder would cause a vignette – although shooting IR and the camera warm – the Vignette would be light rather than dark.

Taking a picture

Tripod – check

Remote shutter release – check

Eventually I changed the camera setup so that it would shoot after a Mirror lock-up just in case that cased vibration.

After a while (it was light out – seeing the LCD screen wasn’t great) I realise that there was some lens flare happening on the filter. Due to the filter holder I was unable to put a lens hood on. Additionally – because there is a slight gap between the filter and the lens – the lens flare (or filter flare) was even happening when pointing away from the sun – the sun was getting into this gap. So I would stand in-between the sun and the camera. However thinking it might be interesting – I also took shots allowing some flare to happen.

Focusing : Because the IR filter is so dark – the camera has no way of focusing using traditional methods – so you have to focus before putting the filter on.

So my procedure for a new shot was:

1. Set-up tripod + camera
2. Frame shot (without IR filter)
3. Focus
4. Switch focusing to Manual (if using autofocus originally)
5. Put IR filter in the holder
6. Close viewfinder cover (in case extra light got in)
7. Take a picture
8. Check Picture on LCD. However this was hard to judge in the light so often viewed the histogram and trusted this.
9. Repeat with exposure changes, and sometimes compostion/orientation changes, and on occasion – allowing flare.

I found that the exposure values I often used were:

All:
ISO: 100
Focusing: Manual
White Balance: Auto (I think – didn’t change it.)
File type: RAW

Wide depth of field:
Aperture: f8
Shutter speed: 20-30seconds

Shallow depth of field:
Aperture: f2.8
Shutter speed: 6sec-10sec

Of course – these values will vary for other cameras depending on their IR sensitivity and the amount of IR light/heat etc.

Should have done:

LCD Loupe: It would have been handy to have a LCD loupe (e.g. Hoodman Loupe) to be able to see the results on the back of the camera.

White Balance: After reading sites online on how to process IR images I realised that I should have, or at least tried to, set a white balance on the camera. With IR filters a little red light still comes through and so pictures usually appear with a red tint. It seems it might be possible to remove this using a custom white balance. It obviously won’t be the standard light colours but should be more interesting than just white. More of this in Processing section.

Focusing: Have read somewhere that focusing should be done differently from my method of focusing without the filter initially – the reason being is that the IR wavelength is significantly different from visible light. Not sure how much of an effect this is. I did notice that if I switched to live-view that the LCD did actually show an approximation of the picture I’d get rather than just dark red! So maybe live view may have done a better job of focusing.

Processing

In the past I just converted IR photos to simple Black and White images, probably through Photoshop. However I thought I’d look up alternative methods – or at least the best way of doing it – possibly within Camera Raw – this lead me to all kinds of options – and included the tip about White Balance I mentioned above.

As per so many other things with digital photograph editing – there are SOOO many ways to edit things and so I won’t go into the options here – instead I’ll just cover what I did.

White Balance

In the past I’ve accepted the fact that the picture will look totally red because of the near-IR light getting in through the filter. However various guides online suggest it might be possible to set a custom white balance to correct for it in the camera – possibly using Live View. However….. I didn’t do this.

So the usual way I set white balance is with Camera Raw – however within itself Camera raw isn’t sufficient on this occasion - the slider will only go so far – not far enough to correct for the VERY red picture. So this calls for an additional process. Some online guides suggest using an alternative RAW converter but another couple I read pointed at the method I eventually used : Creating a DNG profile, applying this first, then using Camera Raw’s own White Balance correction.

To use a DNG profile you need to:

1. A create a DNG file.

You can convert one of your RAW files to a DNG file using Adobe’s. There’s one for Windows, and one for MAC. It’s free but you need to register with Adobe and get a AodbeID. Creating a DNG file is fairly straight forward.

2. Create the Profile file

To create a profile I used Adobe’s DNG Profile Editor. Again free if you have a Adobe Labs ID, or after you register.

To create the Profile (also known as Recipe):

1. Open one of your DNG files
2. Change the controls on the right to the Color Matrices tab
3. Move the “White Balance Calibration” setting – “Temperature” slider all the way to the left. So the red picture turns more orange.
4. Export the Profile using “File -> Export” to the Camera Profiles folder of Adobe. Initially it selected the correct folder for me but trying just now it didn’t. On Windows 7 this is : C:\Users\<USER NAME>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles\ Using a name that represents it’s use i.e. for IR.
5. Close the editor.

Here’s a picture of the slider:

Also the picture pre and post doing this.

To use this profile you then open your RAW picture in Camera Raw, go to the Camera Calibration tab – and select your new profile there – it should be in the list, e.g. (bottom of the drop-down) :

See profile: Nikon D800 IR Recipe.

After that the picture in camera RAW looks orangey. You can then use the White Balance sliders as normal – or the white balance sampler tool. Depending on where you sample this will turn parts of your image orange, and parts blue.

Standard Raw Processing

After the White Balance work you can continue with RAW editing as you normally would, for me this includes:

• Clarity
• Exposure
• Highlights
• Blacks

To get the most of the image.

Then open the image into Photoshop.

Channel Swap

A lot of blogs/guides then suggest swapping the red and blue channel. Not sure why – but this just works – maybe because it has a tendency to turn the sky blue rather than orange – which makes sense to our unconscious mind.

To do this either create a Channel mixer adjustment - or better a Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer. Then on the

Red Channel:  Change Red to 0% andBlue to 100%

Blue Channel: Change Blue to 0% and Red to 100%

So from:

To:

This changes a picture from:

To:

There were a couple of images that I didn’t do this to – they just seemed to work in their original state.

Other Editing

Then continue with your other editing.

Mine varied from picture to picture but some common edits included:

• Levels
• Curves
• Sharpening
• Adjusting Saturation (mostly reduced)

And that’s it really.

Pictures

And so finally – my pictures.

As mentioned above – these aren’t perfect – some have accidental lens-flare and some are on purpose – as after all I think it looks quite nice.

Click on them to see a larger image.

My friend Zoe is the main person behind the UK distribution of Stepper bikes: http://www.3gstepperbike.co.uk. She’d got a team of friends together to do the charity ride on them and asked me if I could do some photography for them. I thought we could do better than just photography – why not video it using the GoPro’s we have at work!

So armed with 6 GoPros and various attachments we kitted out their bikes and one helmet to record it. Needless to say we have HOURS of footage. I’ve only recently found time (and remembered!) to put something together. The internet being what it is with a short attention span I wanted the video to be limited to 3-5 minutes. So I found a suitable song and put a few clips together. Shame it’s so short but it meant only one (long) evening for me.

After producing this someone mentioned that Premiere Pro has a stabilising effect inbuilt – if only I’d known! Don’t fancy re-doing it as I’d have to upload separately and Vimeo free account will only allow one HD video a week.

And a few photos.

Obviously there are the very old-school people like Ian Cunningham (see previous post about a film about him) and then more recently it’s been made popular by the likes of The Sartorialist. But it now seems to be exploding!

During London Fashion week I passed a venue where there was a show and there must have been a dozen or so photographers there. Only one or two who looked like pros.

It’s also interesting to see that a couple of people being photographed are rather common in the different situations – as if they in turn follow the photographers!

(Found via PetaPixel)

Shannon/Forgotten Feline is a taxidermist and creates fun and quirky taxidermy – usually mice with fun props in somewhat alternative poses – not your usual stuff. But she’s also doing a line of hats, fascinators, head-pieces and such. It was these that she asked me to photograph.

Setup is similar to my other product shoots:

• White background  - over a table.
• Reflector/barn doors light, on a boom, pointing down and back at the background
• White Umbrella camera right pointing down at item
• Silver  to subject left bouncing some light at subject and some at background

I could use a third light instead of the reflector but I prefer to keep it simple – also I’ve found that the white umbrella gives a very good spread of light – more than a softbox would.

Here’s a quick diagram:

Before shooting I take a whitebalance setting using a grey card. A colour checker would be better but I don’t have one yet – I’m keeping an eye on eBay etc for cheap ones.

Editing is fairly basic:

• Double checking the white balance
• General exposure adjusting for the whole picture (usually Exposure, Blacks and Shadow sliders)
• Additional exposure for the background in Camera Raw using Quick Mask
• General other tweaks – Clarity, Vibrance, Saturation.

I shoot RAW, edit in AdobeRGB then convert to sRGB for web.

Here are links to her shop and Facebook pages:

Etsy Shop : http://www.etsy.com/shop/forgottenfeline

Facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/ForgottenFelineCouture

And a selection of the pictures:

http://www.canon.co.uk/springcashback/

Products include:
DSLRs – Casback
EOS 5D Mark III
£160/€200
EOS 6D
£100/€125
EOS 7D
£80/€100
EOS 60D
£65 /€80
Lenses & accessories – Cashback
EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM
£80/€100
EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM
£160/€200
EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM
£80/€100
EF 17-40mm f/4L USM
£80/€100
EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM
£235/€300
EF 8-15mm f/4L FISHEYE USM
£155/€200
EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM
£235/€300
Speedlite 600EX-RT
£80/€100
Compact Cameras – Cashback
PowerShot G1 X
£30/€38
PowerShot G15
£30/€38
PowerShot S110
£20/€25
PowerShot SX50 HS
£50/€60
Camcorders – Cashback
LEGRIA HF G25
£75/€95
Printers – Cashback
PIXMA PRO-1
£100/€125
PIXMA PRO-10
£75/€95
PIXMA PRO-100
£50/€60

(Please watch it in HD full screen, not in this little window)

Its partly about Varanasi and the Sadu’s but also partially about their journey and photography/cinematography.

Other than the fact that I think Joey L. is amazingly talented there are a few things that I really like in the documentary :

The fact that they don’t storm in to taking photos – they take a little time to get to know people and get their trust first and have a brief relationship – which I guess when most of us go on holiday we don’t have the luxury of time.

And also the fact that although his equipment is top-notch (e.g. digial medium format) – the setup is relatively simple but gets stunning results. Must be very careful in matching the flash to the ambient light.

There seem to be quite a few Photographer based Documentaries in the works at the moment!

Just seen (via Photo Archive News) that there’s one about Don McCullin showing in London at the moment! May go and see. Although there are a few conflict photography films I have on DVD but yet to watch e.g. Bang Bang Club.

I only realised that Don McCullin was still alive a year or so ago. Since then I’ve :

- Been to see his exhibition at the Imperial war museum which was very impressive – including his famous Nikon which stopped a bullet.

- Just got his autobiography this Christmas (but not read yet) : “Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography”.

- And also realised I’ve lived a couple of streets away from where he grew up in Finsbury Park

Anyway – I have lot of respect for the guy – not just because of photography skill – but how he talks with compassion and emotion about how, what and why he photographed and also the effect it had on him.

Here’s a trailer:

It’s currently showing at the Curzon in Soho.  It looks like it’s showing up to an including Jan 17th. ICA is also showing – but ending same day.

In brief – it’s about RAW files being downloaded via an old copy of Nikon Transfer (part of Nikon View NX) Corrupting RAW files from the D800!

To explain the setup/scenario which caused this for me:

Setup

On large shoots away from home (Weddings, Festivals, Collaborative shoots) I tend to shoot a lot of pictures. During most of these I shoot RAW files and as such even with a large 32Gb card it can fill up. Although I have smaller other cards sometimes these aren’t enough and so I copy files from the card (using a card reader) onto my netbook. Instead of just copying them – I’ve been using Nikon Transfer which is part of View NX. Hadn’t been doing this for any special reasons although there are advantages e.g. it can embed additional Metadata. Without realising it – I was running an old version of Transfer/View NX – not sure now but I think it was version 1.85 while the recent version was approx 2.5.

Procedure

On downloading the images to the netbook local hard drive (using the Transfer application) the previews were appearing in ViewNX just fine, and I previewed one or two and they looked Ok. So after downloading the whole card I formatted it and used it again (after using some other cards).

Discovering the Issue

On returning home I copied the files over from the netbook to my desktop using the home network just using standard file copy.
Opened up Bridge to view them – no go! Bridge couldn’t see them! It said they were not in a correct format.
Went back to the netbook and viewed them in ViewNX (no bridge) and they seemed fine.
Tried to copy again – no change.
Then opened up ViewNX on the desktop – and I could see them there BUT on opening them fully – ViewNX reported them as only being 1632 x 1080! From a D800 they should be 7360 x 4912.

Mad panic!

Investigation

I couldn’t understand why ViewNX could see the images (but report them as being small) while Bridge and other applications couldn’t see anything. I did some online searching and found other people who had run into the same issue – it pointed at the fact that an old version of Transfer had copied over the RAW happy as Lary but significantly corrupted them in the process! Some people said that the files were a total loss (NOT an option for me as this was a paid one-off event!) while others did point at various possible solutions.

Attempted solutions

(Jump to Final Solution below if not interested)

Metadata swap : Partially because of comments I’d seen online and otherwise a belief that Transfer only changed the metadata of files – I attempted a fix where I downloaded a command line program which could copy Metadata from a healthy RAW file, dump it to a local file, and then paste this into one of the corrupt files. No Go

In connection to this I tried checking to see what kind of damage the transfer application did – I had RAW files on cards so copied one just using file copy, and again using the erroneous Transfer application – then compared the files using a file comparison application I use sometimes with coding. Alas they were drastically different – it wasn’t just the header of the file which had changed! I find it quite shocking that Transfer would do this.

Flash card recovery : Even though I knew there was no chance of getting ALL corrupt files back since I had formatted the card and started to re-use it again – there was a chance that I could recover some of the corrupt RAW files. So I installed a current copy of the RescuePro application that comes with Sandisk Extreme cards and gave it a go. And thankfully – it managed to recover quite a lot!

The Card holds about a thousand RAW files.

I had formatted and re-used the card to about half way – and so I was able to recover about half the RAW files from the formatted but un-used card – woohoo!

I discovered two things while trying to install the Rescue Pro software:

1. The code that comes with the card is not in fact the license key – it’s just a code that you have to enter on a website. They then send you the true license key shortly after. Yes I wasted quite some time trying to enter this as the license key!
2. Once validated the licence key is only valid for 12 months. Therefore a previous key I had no longer worked. As such – don’t install this application as soon as you get a card – keep the Serial ID safe and only use to get a license key once you really need to us it.

Copy small (1632 x 1080) images : This wasn’t really an option which I wanted to consider. although technically “HD” they wouldn’t be remotely close to the full res. However I was having dread thoughs of having to take a screen-grab of ViewNX preview to use in Photoshop!

Contact Nikon : I contacted Nikon Support with the hope that they had some special program or technique where they could recover all the original RAW data from the corrupt file – a sort of reverse engineering the corruption, but alas it was not so.  Their reply confirmed partially what I had already found online:

“I am really sorry to learn about your problem with D800 files and old View NX. 

Older Nikon software released before the D800 does not have correct algorithms to recognise the new RAWfile format. Upon transferring it saves some information in an incorrect place, effectively damaging integrity of the file. The issue does not exist with the version distributed together with the camera or newer. 

There is a way to recover full-resolution JPEG previews from the damaged files – they are quite highly compressed so you can see some artifacts (especially in detail-less midtones and shadows), but the quality should be sufficient for most purposes. Please note this is not a official Nikon procedure, however it worked successfully for few other customers that had the same problem. Also, as the IJFR application is not our product, we cannot take any responsibility should it cause any problems. 

1. Please download and install the freeware IJFR utility: http://rawworkflow.squarespace.com/instant-jpeg-from-raw-utility/
2. Create a copy of all your affected images in a single folder (just in case)
3. Select all files, right-click and choose “Instant JPEG from RAW”
4. Select “Native Size only”, “Add suffix” and “JPEGs in folder(s) next to Raws” and click Extract
5. A separate folder will be created, containing the extracted previews.

Also, please uninstall Nikon Transfer (if it appears as a separate application) and your copy of View NX2. Then install the latest version from the link below:”

The link they gave was to Nikon View NX 2.5, but I have an updated one below. Also note above app link is currently dead but I list more below.

Final Solution

For the images.

So the solution was two-fold

1. For the files that were still on the formatted memory card but not written over – RescuePro recoverd the original RAW files.
2. For those I could not recover: So it transpires that in addition to a small thumbnail image (as is saved in some jpeg files) the RAW files contained a full resolution preview! Alas this was heavily compressed but thanks to the D800 36Mpx this was minimised for web images. While jpeg files for the D800 usually come out at 5-20Mb these files were 1.5-3Mb. Of course I would loose the editing advantage of RAW files – but a full res jpeg is better than nothing!

I found a number of applications which could do this extraction:

http://www.pixelfixer.org/

http://rawworkflow.squarespace.com/instant-jpeg-from-raw-utility/ (As suggested by Nikon – Site currently down)

http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

For the Future:

Even future-proofing isn’t straight forward! It seems that if you have an old version (pre 2) of ViewNX and Transfer  installed then just updating View NX will not fix the issue! It seems that it doesn’t always replace the old Nikon Transfer – just installs the new one alongside. So if you have shortcuts just pointing to Transfer (as I did) then you could still run into this issue! So my suggestion is to totally un-install Nikon View related software (+ Transfer) and then do an install of the newest version from scratch.

Currently that is : Nikon View NX 2.6.0

And of course – I will now.

But I am also considering not using Transfer – why would it need to change the RAW file at all other than maybe adding data to the metadata. really not too sure about that.

So that’s it – hopefully this article goes through the internet ether and is noticed by people with modern Nikon Cameras who may still be running the older versions of Nikon Transfer. Or failing that – those with corrupt RAW files who haven’t found the solution.

Here’s a couple more photos.

Remember – it’s all towards a good cause and if you donate over £16 to me or my team you coud win lots of shiny camera/video gear!

http://mobro.co/dafyddowen

See the ever increasing list of prizes at Philip Blooms site – our team leader and organiser of the prizes.

And it’s not all about money of course – Prostate Cancer affects 1 men in 6!! So if there’s a history of it in your family you should get yourself checked sometime.

EDIT: Although Movember funds are open until April – you only have a few hours left to donate and enter the prize draw of my team. Minimum donation and instructions info here : http://gopb.co/movember