Death Valley in Infrared

Now that I have my Nikon D800E converted to infrared (big thanks to Ilija at Kolari Vision for an amazing conversion job and Bob Vishneski for inspiration and tips), I am experimenting with some infrared photography when I have a chance. During my last trip to Death Valley, I armed my D800E with a couple of lenses like the Tokina 16-28 f/2.8 and the Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G and decided to give IR a try by shooting in various conditions. Along the way, I learned a lot of lessons, some of which were quite painful to deal with during the capture, while others were a shocker after I imported images into Lightroom and tried to post-process them with Photoshop.

NIKON D800E + 16-28mm f/2.8 @ 28mm, ISO 100, 4/10, f/8.0

First, I had no idea where to start with my white balance settings. No matter what WB I chose, everything looked either too red or too pink/magenta and weird. I ended up manually dialing WB to 2500, which made it look more or less acceptable. Next, I had to deal with severe underexposure in the camera, so I found myself constantly fiddling with the exposure compensation button. In some situations it was just easier to move to manual mode and using the histogram to understand what was going on with my exposure. I also relied on live