र७२ गेट!

Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness won't engulf my head,
I can see by infrared,
How I hate the night.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep,
Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night।

-Marvin, Life the Universe and Everything, by Douglas Adams.

My Hoya R72 filter arrived in the mail today.
These are classified as deep red, as it's right near the edge of the visible spectrum - so obviously the first thing you do is try to peek through it. It's damn near solid black, but after your eyes adjust for a few moments you can see some very deep red highlights - most notably from foliage. This is an inkling of the infrared effect - foliage reflects quite a lot of infrared light. In contrast, there's very little infrared light in our lovely blue sky - so skies are rather black. Thus the lovely surreal effect.
Now SFX can be used as a normal 200ISO film too, without a filter attached. This is the difference between extended red and infrared film - SFX is sensitive to normal light too.
Now, so far as filters go I only have a Tiffen Yellow #2 and this shiny new R72. R72 gives the most defined Infrared effects with this film, and the Yellow filter gives a little. A red filter would give you something in the middle - I should probably grab one.

Remember! A set of Yellow, Red and Orange filters gives you a nice range of contrast changes over black and white, and some more creative control. Why don't I have a red and an orange? well I keep getting distracted.
Do as I say, not as my buying habits indicate.
So I'm going to try photographing some scenes under normal, IR72, and Yellow filter conditions.

Loading
Film like Kodak HIE requires complete darkness to load. This is because exposing the leader to light will cause it to pipe along the roll, ruining the first few frames or even the whole roll. The number of frames ruined is directly proportional to how paranoid you are.
Ilford SFX can be loaded is normal, subdued light.

Exposure
The exposure compensation for the R72 and similar Deep Red filters is 4 stops. So if you meter 1/250 seconds without the filter on, you'd open up to 1/15 - four stops more light. An Ideal setting is f/5.6 and 1/30 seconds for handheld shooting.
Ilford also states that meters may underexpose by up to 1.5 stops even with this compensation, so bracketing exposure is a good idea. Expose at the value with filter compensation, then one stop more light, then one stop less.

Focusing
If your lens is manual focus, check it - it may have a little red dot to the left or the right on the focus scale. This is because Infrared focuses slightly different to visible light, and after you focus the scene you should shift it so it lines up with the red dot instead of the black dot.
This description applies for my Nikon 50mm f/1.8 E Series, but things may be different on your lens. I assume all the major brand lenses that require IR focus compensation have this indication on the lens.

Modern technology seems to have rectified the IR focus issue, and it isn't required with Auto-Focus lenses. Or at least it isn't indicated on my EF mount lenses. We'll see when we try the film in my EOS 1.

Film Testing
The best idea is to do all your whacky testing on the first roll. Expose and compensate and take notes - you have 36 exposures to go nuts. This film is very speacialised, so it's a bit silly to waste it. Learn from your first roll so you can shoot the second with confidence. This is a good method for any film you wanna try - buy two rolls.

More Information
Check out the Ilford datasheet:
http://www.ilfordphoto.com/download.asp?n=713&f=2007651134552223.पीडीऍफ़

They have them for all of their products, a great resource:
http://www.ilfordphoto.com/products/default.asp

Conclusion
I'll get this developed soon and we'll see how it goes.