I've spent the last couple of days out of London, taking advantage of some good late September weather and indulging my recent interest in digital infrared. I'm not sure what provoked the idea of sandwiching an infrared shot with a colour one, but that is what's happening here.

To explain the process, the camera was tripod-mounted and I took an infrared shot and then immediately removed the filter and shot a normal, visible light photograph. Afterwards, I sandwiched the pictures in Photoshop and changed the Visible light layer's blending mode to Color. This means that the black and white infrared picture's tones are retained, so the sky is dark and the grass is bright, but they are rendered with the colour from the visible light capture.

I feel it's an experiment worth repeating. In some areas, such as the church, the results are quite natural. But I had to use a 15 second exposure for infrared and during that time the clouds moved, so the colour is imperfectly registered and there are blue fringes. The same also happens in the lower right where reeds were moving in the wind and were blurred in infrared but frozen by the 1/80 second colour exposure. While I like the result, next time I'll limit cloud movement by using a much shorter infrared exposure and shooting the colour picture more quickly (at minimum I have to remove the infrared filter and adjust the exposure).

If you want to compare the infrared and colour images, click the “more” link below.