IR Roots and bluegrass photo talk

This past weekend I got out to the Roots and Blugrass Festival that was in town, and as usual took my IR camera out. I wanted to give it a shot with the new version of the flash, and see how it would work. Mostly quite pleased, although holy crap the batteries got hot, had to swap them out at the halfway mark, and they almost burned me it felt like.

I'm going to post the straight out of camera ones, since the ones made black and white are on my flickr in this set. As a side note, what i use to convert to black and white is Nik Siver Efex Pro 2, it does a great job and gives more control, especially for a newbie like me.

 Here is the perfomer Randy Burger singing on the sidewalk, notice the yellow, that's because i balanced the camera to white with the flash. I don't know a middle ground currently, i use a calibration reflector to get white balance better, but it's not perfect. Something funny to note is that the reflections of the people in the window are much more defined than it seems in true color.

Another interesting case of white balance, as what is illuminated by the flash is basically grey scale, and the light coming in from outside is the yellow. Also funny, the flash in the window, not visible by eye, but shows up on the image as the flash has a filter that only lets out ir light. I believe this is also one where i decided to try and bounce the flash at a forty five degree angle up, not sure though.

This one is interesting to me, that room was a basement with almost zero light, so what you see is mostly illuminated by the IR flash. Pretty neat, especially since it would have blinded most people if not filtered for IR. Damn that was packed though, barely room to move, so i didn't get many shots there.

Another flash shot showing how it helped, with a bit of yellow light from other light sources in the background.

Last one, again a very dark room, band farther away, lit by the flash. That window behind them was tinted to visible light too, and also shows more of the daylight balance in the background.

So there you go. Not too thrilling i bet, but its' a learning experience for me, and quite fun trying to predict what things are going to be like. It's also very nice to get the details of dark areas of performances, even though it's only really going to be black and white in the end.