What Planet Are You Living On?

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Got Snow? If not: Create your own with Infra-Red Photography ...

We were dusted with a flurry of snow here, yesterday ... But nothing stuck on the ground : ( Still there is something truly magical about those BIG white fluffy flakes dancing down from the sky. Makes you feel like a kid all over again!

Even though our snow didn't stick on the ground this time: I do just happen to have some IR photos that I took and they look like snow. IR stands for "infra-red" photography. I have been experimenting with IR photography off and on over the course of the past several months. All of my photos, and most digital photos, are taken in the near IR ... that is they capture light from an external source reflected off of an object. Whereas far IR captures energy (heat) radiated directly from a source (e.g., heat retained from absorption of the sun's energy during daylight hours ... many stone and concrete surfaces retain well and hence photograph well in far IR).

Far IR photography captures are most often taken with special IR film, because the digital counterpart technology is so very, very $$costly$$. I do have a nice film camera (an old old Cannon 35mm) that I plan to have serviced (repaired) so that I can use it to take some IR film images. Far IR film images are best taken at night for obvious reasons. In order to do IR photography with a digital camera you need to have a camera with a sensor that is sensitive to IR. Most digital cameras have IR sensitivity disabled. I just happend to have one of the few cameras that is sensitive to IR ... I have a Pentax K-100D (DSLR). If your camera is not sensitive to IR, you can pick up a used one that is or you can pay to have your existing camera modified. The latter can be costly, and I would recommend having a reputable lisenced dealer or manufacturer perform the modification or you could wind up without a working camera all together. There is a simple test that you can do to determine if your camera is sensitive to IR. I'll post some links here shortly for reference.

My dream is to do a nighttime cemetery shoot in far IR, but I have a lot to learn about shooting in digital and near IR first. Shooting in near IR digital is challenging!! Not only do you have to have a good external light source (e.g., sun), but you have no digital preview to work with to see how your shot looks and if you have successfully captured your intended image. That's because you can't look through the lens and IR filter without potentially damaging your eyes and the image that saves on the camera is pre-dominantly RED, RED, RED ... with very few distinguishing detalis readily apparent. So basically, in order take a near IR digital shot you have to:

1) find your shot and compose it (using a tripod) without the IR filter attached to the lens; 2) then tape off your viewfinder (to avoid errant visible light from reaching the camera sensor and interferring with your image ... noise); 3) carefully attach the IR filter of your choosing (there are many types of different filters that produce different effects, but they basically filter out visible light to varying extents) for your specific camera ... all the while being careful not to bump your camera/tripod composed for the shot; 4) and finally take the shot (or shots if you are varing the EV compensation values).

Here is an image as it looks straight off the camera. The image following is what you get after some minimal post processing.

"The Enchanted Fairy Wood"

Photos by Me ... Feel free to reuse this image.

Note: Feel free to use this image, but please link back here to my blog and give me credit as the photographer. Thank you!

And you don't really know what you've captured for an image until you get back home and do some post processing ... specifically, stripping out all of the RED ... to see what you've managed to capture. In the above shot the highlights are overexposed, so I probably had the EV set high (e.g., +2.0) on this shot for experimentation and learning purposes.

In Infra-red photography a lot of knowing "what to shoot" and "how to shoot" it will come from experience ... of which I don't yet have a lot to draw upon. I know that foilage is highly reflective and that with a good light source foilage produces really cool images. Water almost always photographs dark grey or black ... unless you have the sun reflecting intensely off of it, then you get silvery-white patches where the light is most intense. I have managed to capture some interesting reflections in water with IR. Most man-made surfaces do not produce interesting IR images, but they are neat to have in the shot for contrast to the objects that do photograph well in IR. Some stones (e.g., concrete mixes) photograph with an aura about them which is tres cool. People photograph silvery and surreal in IR, but I haven't taken many people shots. The real key to unlocking IR images ... near IR images anyway ... is in the software post processing ... layers, masks and the like ... adding back in selective color in a natural looking way, while leaving the glowing white portions of the images untocuhed ... resulting in ethereal and dreamy images. I still have A LOT to learn in the software image processing department, but I am having FUN on this IR adventure thus far.

So here are a few of my IR photography images ...

(image temporarily removed for editing)

"The Silver Pond"