No kidding! You've got some great examples. It's a texture monster.
So, I've had a pretty big learning experience tonight. Almost a month ago to the day, I ordered some super-cheap IR filters slow-boat from China. When I say "cheap," I mean it. $23 dollars total for two 950nm filters, and one 760nm. Two are for a lens I don't have yet, but one of the 950nm filters fits on my 50mm macro. The good filters are so crazy expensive that I wanted to try some cheap ones first, just to see if I like the experience.
I've mentioned before that the SD1 has a "dust guard" just behind the lens mount. It's a piece of glass which also acts as an IR filter. Sigma is kind enough to let you remove it in case some dust gets in anyway that you need to clean out. All you have to do is slide it up a bit with a finger and it pops out. It's an Instant,
reversible, full-spectrum IR conversion.
My parking lot just got a lot more interesting!
The fact that the SD1 has no live-view is a severe drawback here, as these filters let no visible light through. You have no choice but to shoot blind, and trust the autofocus (which still works with the filter on if the light is strong enough). I don't know if it's just a property of IR photography or the fact that I paid $7 for this filter, but there's a big drop in contrast and resolution. Then again, it could have been a misfocus.
It's still 106° outside, so I did more tests inside. When I tried taking a picture of my Furby
(don't judge me) without the filter (full-spectrum), he turned a brilliant shade of red!
It's supposed to be black.
This is the same shot with the filter on. Notice the focus shift. I did not change the focus; IR focuses at a different distance than visual light.
If you don't convert to black-and-white, infrared is interpreted as a visible red. Apparently, Furby's fur is highly IR-reflective, but not his plastic face, or his mane, which are all actually the same shade of black.
I also found out that fluorescent lights put out almost zero infrared, while incandescents seem to put out even more IR than they do visible light. In this picture, I have fluorescents in the bedroom and the kitchen, but the dining area between the two has an incandescent bulb. Without the camera's IR filter, you can see this as a flood of magenta. This is why all digital cameras need that IR-blocking filter.
Now, here is the weirdest part of shooting IR with this camera. Here's another filtered IR shot of Furby...
...and here's the out-of-camera JPEG for that same shot. I didn't touch it! This is seriously how the camera's JPEG engine believes the picture should look.
That's not an isolated incident, either.
Every single infrared picture I took had a JPEG that looked that weird. Actually, if I left the camera in color mode, it looked even worse. Here's another unedited JPEG (full-spectrum) in all its head-exploding glory:
...and this is from the raw file, edited into sanity:
Additionally, the raw files come out about two stops brighter than the JPEGs. Too weird...
I have a lot to learn.