A couple of interesting things in this photo. First, the birds…it was like The Birds, the movie. These crows kept landing on the tree, flying off the tree, circling the tree, squawking all the time. It was actually kind of disconcerting.
The second thing…this is a digital infrared photo. Infrared photography takes in near-infrared light (it doesn’t see through things like x-rays or anything – it’s just past red). Unlike visible-spectrum film where things that are brighter show up as brighter in the final result, infrared responds to things that reflect specifically IR more efficiently. Chlorophyll – that which makes leaves and grass green – is especially reflective, and much IR photography is done in the spring.
This was taken yesterday, in very December. The leaves are actually all kinds of colors – red, yellow, brown. None of them green. The leaves are dying, and falling with each wind gust. Yet here you can see that all of the leaves come out the same “color” in IR.
I was quite surprised by this, actually.
This is a false color image – IR doesn’t have color (since color is just a mental mapping and interpretation of various wavelengths, and since our eyes can’t pick up IR wavelengths, we have no interpretation of them). But the camera and processing method creates these false colors which have an interesting and hopefully aesthetically-pleasing effect.