Infra Red in the Suffolk Countryside

Following an interesting talk at Cambridge Camera Club yesterday, I was moved by the combination of sunshine and blue sky with a few clouds to take out my infra-red converted camera for a walk before dusk.

Infra red converted cameras are sensitive to reflected infra-red and particularly foliage glows white as chlorophyll reflects lots of IR. Blue sky reflects very little, so ir rendered dark.
 
I am including some of each of the commonest IR presentation techniques.  Straight out of the camera for a surreal colouration (those with the red sky); channel swapped where I have rendered all of the red stuff in the original as blue and vice versa which returns a blue sky, but still fairly surreal; finally I have rendered most of the images in monochrome which gives dark skies and glowing vegetation.

National Memorial Arboretum

En route to Blackpool where we were staying for the PAGB Inter Club National Print Finals, we decided to break the journey at The National Arboretum to take in some autumn colour.  Unfortunately, the autumn colour failed to live up to our hopes as most of the trees are still young.  The fact the the central memorial was also closed for maintenance prior to the Remembrance Day events was also disappointing.  Having said that I would certainly return if travelling up the M6 Toll road - the food was good and it was certainly a pleasant place to explore

Photographing Fungi in Brandon Country Park

On Friday morning four of us went to Brandon Country Park (in Thetford Forest) in search of fungi and hoping to avoid the downpours which were forecast.  In the event, we were spoilt for choice with respect to the fungi - once you left the path, you could hardly walk without treading on fungi and the weather held of until just before we left.  I learned a lot about the fungi, though I am still ignorant regarding the species I was photographing apart from the easily distinguished bright red hallucinogenic fly agaric with its white spots and the delightful fircone fungi which grow on (presumably last year's) fircones - the fircones we found were about the size of the top joint of my thumb and populated with masses of tiny fungi.  The bright yellow fungi at the end are stag's horn fungi which were growing on a tree stump - each one is about 5mm high.  A few "autumn in the woods" shots thrown in for good measure!

For those interested, these were all taken on my Olympus OM-D E-M1, mostly using the 60mm macro lens (fircones using focus stacking)

 

A few autumn shots

And some more fungi

A fly agaric emerging