Taking photos through an infrared filter gives your pictures a great effect, often beautiful, sometimes quite spooky! Do a quick search on Flickr to see what I mean.

It’s an effect that can be achieved quite cheaply without the need for an expensive SLR camera with a fancy lens.

Step 1: Choose your subject. Make sure it’s something stationary rather than a fast moving car or people. The reason being is that your camera shutter will be open for a few seconds, so anything moving is going to be nothing but a blur.

Step 2: Place the camera on your tripod. Make sure it’s on level ground. If it’s on something like grass and is uneven, adjust the legs of the tripd so that the image in the view finder is level.

Step 3: Adjust the exposure time on your camera to about 15 seconds (check in the user’s manual on how to do this)

Step 4: Hold the IR filter in front of your lens. This is the only tricky part. You’ll need to hold it flush against the lens, ensuring that there are no gaps between the glass of the filter and the camera lens. You can also try attaching it with some sticky tape or blu-tack.

Step 5: Take the photo. As it’s a long exposure time, you’ll have to wait for the shutter to close, you’ll hear a click when it does.

Step 6: Review your photo on the camera, if it’s too dark increase the exposure time, if it’s too light, decrease it. It’s all a bit experimental so don’t worry if it takes you a few shots to get it right.

You can edit the photo in an application such as Photoshop. Many IR shots look great when they are converted to black and white so give that a go first. You could also try tweaking the color and contrast balances.

I found that every shot was different and benefited greatly from 10-20 minutes of “playing around” in Photoshop to see what made it look best. That’s one of the great things about digital photography, you can tweak and edit your shots until you get it just right.

Daniel runs http://www.dan-jackson.com/blog - a UK based blog about photography, digital imaging and everything in between.