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What do I need to take infrared photos? First you need a camera with an adjustable shutter speed.  SInce you can hardly see through the infrared filter your camera needs to have a long enough shutter speed to allow enough light through to produce an image.  For the example below I set the shutter speed to 60 seconds (one less than ‘Bulb’!). Secondly you need a tripod or some sort of support so that the camera does not move during the time when it is taking the photo (60 seconds).  If you do not have a tripod then you can use a folded jumper or bean bag to steady the camera. You also need (obviously) an Infrared filter for your lens.  These can be expensive but if you just wan to try your hand at the technique without shelling out loads of cash then you can pick up a lens from eBay for about £10 (these aren’t great quality but do the job and show you the basic results). Photoshop or a similar photo editing software package is also needed for the fine tuning in post processing.  There is a free ‘version’ of Photoshop called Gimp which some people say is just as good. How I took the infrared photo I selected a scene including water for the example below.  As the shutter speed is slow it gives the water that smooth calm look and adds to the overall ‘feel’ of the shot.  I set the shutter speed to 60 seconds, the FStop to 9 and the ISO to 400, everything else I left on ‘Automatic’.  This is the result (and the image without the filter attached); Once I had dowloaded the image from the camera to my computer I opened it in Photohop, I then did the following; Image – Adjustments – Auto Levels (I personally think that this is the best version of this particular photo?) Image – Adjustments – Channel Mixer Set the ‘Output Channel’ dropdown list to ‘Red’.  Change the ‘Source Channel’ for ‘Red’ to ’0%’ and then change the ‘Blue’ slider to ’100%’ (this is NOT all the way on each slider!). Repeat the above step but select ‘Blue’ in the ‘Output Channel’ dropdown list and change the ‘Red’ slider to ’100%’ and the ‘Blue’ slider to ’0%’ Lastly I adjusted the levels (Image – Adjustments – Levels) until I got the contrast to that of my liking. Some great examples of Infrared photography can be found on Flickr! Preview image by photoprodigy