It's infra-red, but not as I knew it...

I've tried this before. Infra-red photography intrigues me; the chance to turn the familiar and cliched into the strange and interesting is intoxicating. But it never works out. I've followed tutorials to the letter, I've tried playing about just about every button (even the ones I don't understand!) in Adobe Lightroom but nothing ever looked anything like the sort of stuff that I saw on the internet. I was in Kinvara, in North Clare over the weekend, and the shots I got finally looked at least a little bit like those I've seen before. Here's a couple:

Ignore the hot-spots - I desperately need a wide-angle lens that doesn't do this, the 18-55mm kit lens is notorious for the blue spots in some of the pictures.

While infra-red is fun, especially when the results come out the way you wanted them, I wonder if it could make me a bit lazy. I don't have 'normal' versions of any of these pictures but I would imagine they would be somewhat underwhelming. The trippy and interesting colours take the focus, and to my eye anyway they take it at the expense of the usual things that draw one into a photo. It's fun, but I doubt it'll ever be more than a novelty for me.

I didn't just take infra-red photos, there was a pretty astonishing sunset that evening - the upshot of the crazy weather we've had recently. One of these days I'm going to stop myself taking pictures of sunsets on beaches, but the quality of the results compared to the rest of my stuff makes it too tempting to stop just yet...