I spent Labor Day weekend in Tulsa, OK and had the opportunity to eat Sunday brunch at the Osage Restaurant. The food was excellent and I enjoyed the view of the Osage hills from our window-side table*. After brunch we spent a few hours in the Gilcrease museum viewing many paintings, art, statues, Native American artifacts, and much about American history including historical manuscripts, documents and maps. Gilcrease Museum hosts the world’s largest, most comprehensive collection of art and artifacts of the American West – and it shows. I spent much longer inside the museum then I had intended. After our museum visit I went outside to the garden with my IR camera.

What I really want to write about today is black-and-white infrared photography. In previous posts, I’ve shown “unprocessed” IR images here and here, and some “false color” processed images here. Before digital cameras infrared photography was done with IR film and many photographers used black-and-white IR film primarily to create eye-catching black-and-white images. I believe there was quite a bit of “false color” processing with color infrared transparency films, but what has always stood out about IR photography is the fantastic contrast and range of infrared – not to mention striking aspects like dark skies and white trees. I finally got around to processing some of my infrared images of the Gilcrease gardens this last week and I really like the black-and-white results I’m getting. (I know, it’s been almost a month – you can complain about it in the comments ;-) It’s taken some experimentation and a couple of attempts to develop the images in this gallery and I’m sure I’ll continue to refine and improve my IR black-and-white process and development. These were processed using Adobe Lightroom 2. After developing a number of black-and-white IR images I believe I have a good starting point in Lightroom for B&W IR and I will share that preset along with my other IR presets in a later post. Meanwhile, here is Gilcrease Garden in black-and-white infrared.

I’d like to thank my hosts for hanging out and letting me spend several hours in the garden. I’m pretty sure they were ready to leave before I finished inside. You can find more information about the Gilcrease at Virtual Gilcrease.

*I just noticed while on their web site that the Osage Restaurant has been sold and will be managed by Sodexo. Too bad – I have nothing good to say about Sodexo (and I’ll just leave it at that).