Canon G9 Infrared / Discuss

cablefreak    says:

Greetings all,

I have experimented a little with "universal settings" for infrared work lately with my new G9 toy, despite frosty weather and frozen fingertips. ;-)

My goal was to find a hyperfocal setting of the G9 lens that enables me to just hook up the camera with attached Hoya R72 (or equiv) filter on the good tripod, switch to "IR-mode" on the camera (C1 or C2 on the dial) and simply adjust shutter speed to match the current lighting conditions, keeping an eye at the histogram. Then fire away with these settings. Just like that. No fiddling.

When I experimented with the hyperfocal issue the other day, I found that the G9 lens is sharp enough at f/2.8, and by setting manual focus very close up (approx 60cm) will give sharp results from a few meters to infinity. Yes, you have to focus much closer than with visible light to get focused much further away.

I took some screenshots off the G9 screen to guide you through my thoughts and ideas. First off, I use the metric system in my G9 and in this review. I yet have to try this in feet/inches to know how to translate.

This is my workflow, not sure if it works for you, but here it is. :-)
Note the blue-ish cast on my LCD-screen... eek!




1. Set manual mode on the dial, then change the following settings in the main menu (disregard the others) MF-point zoom ON, Safety MF OFF, AF Assist Beam OFF, Review Info Detailed, Record RAW+JPEG ON, IS Mode OFF.




2. Set B/W mode in the Func.set menu (i find that this helps in terms of evaluating exposure on the screen)

3. Set manual focus by pressing MF and turn the dial until the focus scale looks exactly as in the picture below (please note that I'm only referring to the metric system, sorry about that).




4. Press the +/- button to exit manual focus and return to exposure settings. Set the shutter speed to something like 3"2 for a good start. Aperture should be set to f/2.8 and use full wide angle of the lens (equiv 35mm) for this whole tutorial to work!

5. Now you are ready to save these settings into the custom C1 or C2 mode on the dial by entering main menu and the last item "Save settings".

A good idea is to set the "Display Off" timer in the "Power Saving" menu to 3min (maximum setting) because manual focus settings are lost after a resume state after a display off, so you want to keep it up and running as long as possible to accomodate some fiddling between shots. It would make you really confused if the focus setting all of a sudden changed. I found out the hard way. ;-)

By setting the display timer, the camera instead waits 3 minutes after no activity and shuts off completely. The next time you switch the camera back ON, it will reload the manual focus setting and all the other settings stored in C1/C2.

The below picture is pretty much what the screen would look like when shooting with the settings in this tutorial. I try to shoot infrared at ISO80 whenever possible!




Adjust the exposure only by setting the shutter speed (using evaluative metering to help nailing it) something close to 0EV should do, I often have to set a +1EV exposure when shooting IR with the G9.

Take a close look at the histogram in the detailed view after each shot , watch out for clipping highlights, I recommend staying a little low on the histogram to avoid clipping red channel (because you won't notice by looking at the histogram). The picture below was shot with no clipping reds in the post processing.




Finally, a quick focus check with the zoom rocker at the picture review screen to reveal any soft focus or motion blur.




Final result after some post processing in CS3:

www.flickr.com/photos/cablefreak/2226399805/


That's it for now. Happy IR-shooting! I will get back with a tutorial on how I prefer to process the G9 RAW infrared images in Photoshop CS3.

Cheerio!
Originally posted at 1:22PM, 3 February 2008 PDT (permalink)
cablefreak edited this topic 52 months ago.