Two of my favorite YouTube channels both recently featured photographic outings to produce infrared photos. Steve O’Nions posted this wonderful video on infrared photography and Mat Marrash kicked it up a notch with some 8×10 infrared work in this video. Both videos are great fun with some beautiful photography and I highly recommend checking them out.
I had resisted the siren call of infrared for essentially all of my photographic career. Every so often I’d try to process a B&W image to make it look like I had shot infrared (usually with disastrous results) but I had never actually tried it. After watching those two videos and realizing that infrared might be a solution for one of my gripes in life (more on that later), I decided that it might be fun to finally test the waters a bit.
Before spending money on an infrared converted camera, I thought I’d see what kind of work I could do with a minimal investment. Digital cameras natively see very, very well into the infrared realm. Because of this, they have filters in front of their sensors made to block most of the infrared light getting to them (UV as well). These filters vary in their strength and sometimes there’s enough IR light left over to allow for infrared photography, though the shutter speeds will be quite long.
There’s an easy way to test this. Take a TV remote control, point it at your camera, press a button on the remote and then take a picture. If the infrared bulb lights up, there’s enough infrared getting to the sensor to allow some IR photography without converting the camera to a dedicated IR camera or a full spectrum camera. My D800 passed this test, so I decided to order a cheap 760nm IR filter off of Amazon just to see if I liked the process and results.
It worked. Wonderfully. While 760nm isn’t too far into the IR realm, it’s far enough to get some otherwordly effects.
It makes me wonder what the longer wavelength IR filters would do on a converted camera (I don’t think I’d push my luck trying a 950nm filter on a stock camera, for instance). That may be an avenue I’ll have to investigate some day for one very good reason.
I’ve mentioned several times on the blog that summer can depress me with its long days of high sun. Shooting in the middle of the day in the middle of summer are pretty much perfect conditions for shooting infrared photography, though. IR light bounces around quite a bit and fills in shadows nicely, so high sun doesn’t have the same ugly look it does for visible spectrum photography. Because of that, I think that by next summer, a full spectrum converted camera might be a good investment for me.
The full spectrum conversion just removes all IR/UV filtration in front of the sensor. Such cameras can still be used for visible light photography, though they require the same kind of filter that was removed from the sensor to be used in front of the lens. Other options like various wavelengths of IR filter and UV filters can also be used for a variety of effects. I think having a full spectrum of possibilities might be just the thing to cure the summertime blues for this photographer!