First IR shot with crop and color versions

I recently got a Hoya R72 filter, and attached it to my Kodak P880 to give IR photography a try. Not much green anywhere right now, so I settled for a shallow river channel. Last summer's flooding had this river several feet higher, but it is back to this shallow, sandbar filled state. A 6 sec exposure made the water silky smooth; I think I could have gotten away with 4 sec but I'm still experimenting with exposures.

I can't recall seeing many, or any, IR shots on NPN. What is the reason for this? Is the look to different from what most people expect and thus wouldn't sell?

Thanks for looking and commenting.

The IR treatment seems a good choice for this subject, bare trees and river detritus, but a black and white conversion of a regular color image might have done just as well. Looks like you had a bit of a breeze going that softened up some of the smaller branches.

The IR images that have been most interesting to me are those with wide temperature differences and therefore dramatic sweeps of tonality, which give a kind of otherworldly appearance to otherwise familiar subjects.

Normally I don't much care for dead trees and branches in an image because they can really clutter things up and draw attention away from your subject, but in this case I think they work pretty well, they line up well and make a good pattern, and the foreground line of debris is echoed by another line in the background.

The image on the whole may work better without the large blank area of sky and the extreme difference in height between the foreground and background trees. You might see if you like it better with the top third to two-fifths cropped out. I think it may give the image a greater sense of depth because it concentrates your attention a little more on the receding line of the river, plus it may help solve these other problems as well.

I don't really have a good answer for why there's not much IR here, and I'm absolutely not the guy to give a good answer about what sells. I know Tim Ernst was doing a lot of IR for awhile but I haven't seen any IR in his work for a long time. Maybe he's sold his IR gear.

Hey Rob, I see that Randy beat me too what was going to be my suggestion ... cropping the top 1/3 + to a pano format to focus more attention on the many interesting elements in the foreground. Overall a good candidate for IR and a solid image.

No idea why IR doesn't garner more attention on NPN but there have been a few posted, with Tim E being one. Thanks for sharing.

Here is a b/w crop, as suggested by Randy and Wayne. Is this what you guys had in mind? Thanks for the input.

I found a tutorial on colorizing IR photos, mostly by swapping the red/blue channels. Here is what I came up with. I like the shimmer in the water. What do you think?

That's pretty close to what I had in mind, but I would actually take a little more off the top. Your crop works, too, and I like the higher contrast of that image as well.