Always working to keep the creative juices flowing, I recently combined my desire to get out and hike in the cold fresh air with an idea to try some infrared (IR) photography ... with a manual focus 8mm fish-eye lens.
Working
in IR offers both significant challenges and broad creative
opportunities. The challenges come when switching from 'normal'
photography, capturing visible light in a more "what you see is what you
get" process to capturing infrared light in a more "what will I be able
to create from this" process. The later is more akin to B&W
photography in my opinion as we don't see in IR just as we don't see in
B&W. Greater familiarity with B&W photography makes that process
more intuitive, while IR photography has a greater trial and error
component for me at my current level of expertise.
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| limestone arch |
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| downstream |
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| down the tracks |
The first challenge comes when selecting the gear that will be used for IR photography. Digital camera sensors, unless modified, are made to see only light in the visible wavelength spectrum. IR filters or a modified camera will be required to get started and there are a number of choices.Camera lenses are designed for optimum performance with visible light and may perform poorly when shooting IR images. There are plenty of online resources that offer information on these aspects of IR photography and Google is your friend if you want to get into it more detail. Alternately, you could send me a question via the comment section or by email and I'll see if I can offer some assistance.
Once the decisions related to camera, filter and lens have been made, it's on to the capture phase of working in IR. This is really just the process of collecting the raw materials that will be crafted into a final image. For the most part, infrared images straight out of camera (using filters or a converted camera) are not the end result in this genre. I say for the most part, because this is really a more abstract pursuit but that depends on the artist ...
... yes the "Artist", and like all art, it may or may not be for you whether photographer or viewer.
DJE
