Professional Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow shares daily photos of the city he loves. Exploring Minneapolis through Photography while teaching composition and techniques.

OK, OK, I’ll give the infrared a rest. But since today in my “Moment of Zen” day, where I try to stop your thoughts with an odd image, it fit. Here’s my TerraTrike. It’s a recumbent trike, loads of fun and a joy to ride. The best part is that I can haul my big camera around in the saddle bag and use it as a table when I am setting up my gear. Plus it’s funner-n-ell in the winter; I go looking for ice patches to slide on.

This is Fort Snelling State Park just south of the MSP airport in the Minnesota river valley.

Professional Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow shares daily photos of the city he loves. Exploring Minneapolis through Photography while teaching composition and techniques.

Another stop on the amazing Minneapolis bike trail system. This is one of over a dozen little bridges over the Minnehaha creek. The trail follows the creek from the base of Lake Harriet to the Minnehaha Falls. I’ll post a photo of the falls sometime, but it’s a perennial favorite of photography students and tourists, so I am a tad reticent to shoot it. Maybe I should see what it looks like in infrared…

I explain how to take infrared photos here.

Professional Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow shares daily photos of the city he loves. Exploring Minneapolis through Photography while teaching composition and techniques.

This is the path from Minnehaha Falls to Fort Snelling. I love this path, it’s a destination bike ride for me. The surface is a little rough, but it’s fun to imagine the old trains chugging up this route on their way to Minneapolis. The new light-rail commuter train is just up the hill and you can sometimes hear it in the distance.

This is life in the Northern Deciduous Forest of Minnesota, a contiuous canopy of oak, beech, ash, aspen, maple and cottonwood trees surrounded by a wide variety of ground covering plants. As horrific as this place can get in the winter, summer more than makes up for it.

I explain how to take infrared photos here.

Professional Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow shares daily photos of the city he loves. Exploring Minneapolis through Photography while teaching composition and techniques.

Here’s yesterday’s location, only in infrared. I keep forgetting that I can do this. I waited all winter for the bright green foliage of summer so that I could take my infrared camera out.

As you can see from these two photos, the foliage reflects infrared light so they appear as crystal white masses. The sky goes black and the clouds go white. There are special cameras for taking infrared, but a lot of point-and-shoots can do it. I’m using a Sony F828 for this. If your P&S has a “night mode”, then it probably does a decent job of infrared. The easy way to test it is to point your TV remote at the camera lens and push a button. If you see a light coming from the remote on the screen, your camera see IR. Then you need a filter. Light colors are measured in wavelengths and the filters are numbered accordingly, 720nm, 820nm and 1000nm are the common ones. The first two do a good job, the 1000nm is hard to work with, with so little light, you need a tripod.

If y’all like these, I’ll take some more…

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

On the news this morning, I heard that last night the low temperature was 35°F, the first time above freezing since November 16th. Spring is coming and soon these bare trees will have some leaves and the rolling hills of the tundra will be alive with the color of green.

Thanks for all the great comments on yesterday’s post about cairns. I continue to be amazed at how quickly information can be found on the web. So many trips to the library avoided, so many projects not held up. I’m now starting to take a serious look at my extensive book collection and ask it why I have to share my space with it. Sure, I’ll always keep the fine-printed art books, but so many reference books haven’t been opened in years.

Soon I’ll be posting pictures I took downtown with the Tips from the Top Floor Group. My freind Bob Kupbens took a shot of me while we were there that I like.

With the warming weather, the ice on the lakes is melting and soon we’ll have open water again. Just follow the ducks.

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

I captured this vista during my hike on Sunday at Afton. It’s amazing what a wide-angle and some clever processing can do to a cold Minnesota plain.

The ultra-wide-angle lens that I have been using for a while now has some interesting characteristics when it comes to distortion. It’s an aspherical lens that has almost no fish-eye effect, but it tends to stretch lines that go to the corners. Also, if you point it anywhere that is not the horizon, it tilts everything causing “falling lines.” This means that I have to shoot landscapes straight on, placing the horizon boringly dead-center. So now I look for compositions that can handle these conditions an here is one of my favorites. I was able to through some great diagonals across the image with the path and the clouds. Turn up the post processing to emphasize the lines and I think it works.

Also, the way I processed it is close to a lightroom preset called “direct positive” that I have used before. It made the image look like a photo my dad of my grandparents standing in a wheat field taken in 1966. The direct-positive look mimics the way that color photos were processed in the 1960s. It’s pretty rough on the image, but when the right opportunity comes along, I love to use it.

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

This is the little-known ever-terrifying Washburn Water Tower, hard to find, it is located in south Minneapolis in a confusing little area known as Tangletown — so named for the street layout. Perched on a hill surrounded by trees, this beast was built in 1932 with massive eagles atop and scary Templar Knights at the base. The knights are “guardians of health” designed to protect Minneapolitans from typhoid — tainted water had reciently been linked to the disease. The first time I went there was at night, so I’m even more afraid of the place.

I went through a fit of infrared photography at the time and decided that the spooky effects of infrared would suit this location. Infrared is the light above human vision. the human eye can detect light that has a wave length of 380 to 750 nanometers. Infrared is from 700 - 1400nm. I shot this with a 1000nm filter that cuts out all light below that. I was using a Sony F828 camera that has a night mode.

The best thing about infrared — trees. They glow like crazy. Second best is the sky, it goes black and the clouds go white.

Here’s a perk for all of you with point-and-shoot cameras: Big DSLRs have filters that prevent them from taking IR photos. A lot of P&S cameras have a ‘night mode’, if yours does, put it in night mode and then point your TV remote at the lens and push a button. If you see the light on the screen, your camera picks up IR. Do a little research: type in your camera model name and ‘IR’ or ‘infrared’ and see if anyone has talked about your camera. All you need is a filter and a tripod (you are cutting out a lot of light with the filter, so shutter speeds will be slow). I would recommend a 72 or 75 filter, they are a lot cheaper than the 1000nm I bought (I’m a bit of an extremest). I’ve since discovered that I can convert my Sony F828 to be Infrared in regular mode. It costs $350 at maxmax.com. Have you done this? Let me know. I’m interested in doing so.