Working in another light

Cap­tur­ing what we can­not see

When we are out there tak­ing pho­tographs, we are essen­tial­ly cap­tur­ing reflect­ed light. A small part of the light that we col­lect is infrared light that is invis­i­ble to the naked eye. The most com­mon use for infrared pho­tog­ra­phy is for indus­tri­al, mil­i­tary and sci­en­tif­ic pur­pos­es, but when used in the land­scape, the results are often fas­ci­nat­ing and ​‘oth­er world­ly’. Infrared pho­tog­ra­phy was first used dur­ing WWII as it became a valu­able tool in cut­ting through atmos­pher­ic haze, mak­ing it eas­i­er to iden­ti­fy build­ings that reflect very lit­tle infrared light, so appear­ing dark in an open land­scape. In the thir­ties and for­ties, the movie indus­try embraced infrared-sen­si­tive films, and dur­ing the six­ties, infrared images were used for album covers.

Choos­ing to see differently

Dur­ing the days of film, you could quite eas­i­ly buy infrared film over the counter, load it in your cam­era and head out; but with the intro­duc­tion of dig­i­tal, this became a slight­ly trick­i­er affair as dig­i­tal cam­era man­u­fac­tur­ers fit infrared cut-off fil­ters to cam­era sen­sors which pre­vent the sen­sor from see­ing infrared light which can pro­duce rather odd effects when a pho­tog­ra­ph­er is aim­ing to make pho­tographs look like the scene. 

The process of get­ting your cam­era con­vert­ed is quite straight­for­ward, but cer­tain­ly best left to the experts. Essen­tial­ly, the infrared block­ing fil­ter is removed, allow­ing infrared light to be seen by the sen­sor, and in its place, a vis­i­ble light fil­ter is fit­ted. Pri­or to being able to get a cam­era con­vert­ed, you had to place an infrared fil­ter on the front of your cam­era lens. These are still avail­able but let vir­tu­al­ly no vis­i­ble light through, mak­ing it very hard to com­pose, focus and intro­duce pro­hib­i­tive­ly long expo­sure times. 

The world through infrared — how the land­scape changes

After you have had your cam­era con­vert­ed to infrared, you can use it as you ordi­nar­i­ly would and even use aut­o­fo­cus. The only dif­fer­ence will be if your cam­era is mir­ror­less, you will see the world in real-time infrared, where­as a DSLR will present every­thing as colour. There are sev­er­al choic­es of infrared fil­ters that you can choose from that will give you sub­tly dif­fer­ent results. The most com­mon con­ver­sion is the 720nm con­ver­sion, which gives the best black and white images. A fil­ter such as the 665nm is good if you would like to try colour infrared, which is quite pop­u­lar, where the fin­ished images will have blue skies and pink foliage. For me, the clar­i­ty and tonal range from the 720nm fil­ter are per­fect and offer a vast array of oppor­tu­ni­ties. The aver­age cost of get­ting your dig­i­tal cam­era con­vert­ed to infrared is £350, and most peo­ple com­mit to this when they upgrade and con­vert their old cam­era body. 

You may be ask­ing what objects will look like if pho­tographed in infrared. First­ly, water and blue skies absorb infrared light, so they appear very dark in the final image, hence that ​‘clas­sic’ infrared land­scape image with almost total black skies and pure white clouds. Skin reflects a lot of infrared light, so the per­son in the pic­ture will look very pale indeed and, in some cas­es, ghost­ly! The most obvi­ous con­sid­er­a­tion in land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy is how foliage appears. Chloro­phyll in green leaves and grass­es reflects a great deal of in infrared light and is ren­dered in very pale tones.

Old expec­ta­tions — hard light, hard results

About ten years ago, Advanced Cam­era Ser­vices con­tact­ed me and explained that they were con­vert­ing DSLR cam­eras into infrared and asked whether I would like to try one out. Of course, I agreed, but when the cam­era arrived, all I could pic­ture in my mind were the hard blacks and bleached whites of the infrared pho­tographs I had made as a pho­tog­ra­phy stu­dent many years ago. The cam­era I was sent was the Nikon D70 with a lit­tle 6‑megapixel sensor. 

Hav­ing agreed to do this, one day I head­ed to a place where I often went as a stu­dent, Form­by Point in Mersey­side, with the sole inten­tion of explor­ing infrared again. It was spring­time, and there was a lot of sun about and fresh leaves on the trees and blue skies with white clouds, which, in gen­er­al terms, is regard­ed as good for infrared pho­tog­ra­phy. I arrived home, uploaded the files to my com­put­er, and got exact­ly what I expect­ed. The tones were very hard, high in con­trast, and I was not par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed or inspired to take the cam­era out again. 

Work­ing against convention

Lat­er that year, I head­ed up to the north­west coast of Scot­land. I was still car­ry­ing around the lit­tle D70 IR con­vert­ed cam­era. I had had plen­ty of time to con­sid­er the results from my ear­li­er trip to Form­by Point, and the con­clu­sions I came to where if I could sub­due the con­trast of the infrared image, then pos­si­bly it would pro­duce pho­tographs that were in some way pleas­ing to me. 

I began by head­ing out in what a lot of infrared pho­tog­ra­phers con­sid­ered the poor­est con­di­tions, over­cast days with hard­ly any direct sun – in fact, I was dis­cov­er­ing that vir­tu­al­ly no sun at all gave me the tones I want­ed. I also soon dis­cov­ered that the use of fil­ters became almost redun­dant. Because of the nar­row his­togram and the way the cam­era records a nar­row band­width of light, there were hard­ly any sit­u­a­tions where I felt the need to fit a grad­u­at­ed fil­ter, as the high­lights were record­ed beau­ti­ful­ly. One of the fre­quent chal­lenges to pho­tograph­ing trees is the dynam­ic range of the subject. 

Learn­ing to read sub­tle light

Work­ing with an IR con­vert­ed cam­era that essen­tial­ly sees what we can­not, pos­es chal­lenges when you are try­ing to stan­dard­ise your approach. I soon learned that the slight­est intro­duc­tion of sun­light, even soft sun­light, would throw the expo­sure to the right instant­ly, even if this was by no means appar­ent to the naked eye.

The beau­ty of qui­eter light

Sub­tle light is slight­ly exag­ger­at­ed by infrared, result­ing in an image that dis­plays beau­ti­ful lumi­nos­i­ty in the high­lights with­out the over­bear­ing shad­ows asso­ci­at­ed with strong light. There­fore, if you can under­stand these sub­tleties and learn to ​‘see’ them, you can cap­ture fleet­ing moments of light that IR will ren­der as sparkling and retain shad­ows with rich luminosity.

The moment of real­i­sa­tion — the prob­lem was the light

The prob­lem was the light! As ridicu­lous as that sounds, that was all that it was. The brighter the day and the more preva­lent the sun­light, the brighter the high­lights, and I would then have a strug­gle on my hands when it came to pro­cess­ing the files. The oth­er aspect of infrared that fas­ci­nat­ed me was the nar­row band­width of light that the cam­era cap­tured; the his­togram was nar­row, which led me to con­sid­er the flex­i­bil­i­ty of such a file if exposed in more sub­tle con­di­tions. One after­noon, I was dri­ving through Apple­cross in the High­lands of Scot­land when a storm was build­ing across the Inner Sound, and the Isle of Rona and Isle of Skye were slow­ly van­ish­ing in the approach­ing cloud. Although I had decid­ed that if I were to explore infrared again, it would have to be in ​‘qui­eter light’, this seemed to be tak­ing things a lit­tle too far, but I was wrong.

The com­po­si­tion was sim­ple. Look­ing out over a small head­land towards Inner Sound in the back­ground was the approach­ing storm, and sit­u­at­ed in the fore­ground was a small stand of pines. With­out any fil­ters at all, I placed the cam­era on my tri­pod and made the expo­sure. When I got back that evening, I looked at the file, and after it was con­vert­ed to black and white, I was faced with an image of beau­ti­ful tones and sub­tle greys. The storm clouds were ren­dered won­der­ful­ly, and the pines had a sub­tle pale glow as the low lev­els of infrared light had been reflect­ed from the many green nee­dles on the pines. It was appar­ent that if I had tak­en this same com­po­si­tion on my D800e and con­vert­ed it to black and white, I would have had a chal­lenge with retain­ing the brighter detail in the skies set against the dark­er shad­ow tones of the pines.

Expo­sure requires restraint

Remem­ber to use your cam­era as you usu­al­ly would, and feel free to use aut­o­fo­cus and the camera’s inter­nal light meter. One of the most impor­tant things to remem­ber when shoot­ing in infrared is not to expose ful­ly to the right, as pho­tog­ra­phers are often told. The rea­son for this is that the his­togram from an infrared con­vert­ed cam­era is nar­row­er, and shoot­ing to the right will push many of the image tones into high­lights, which are dif­fi­cult to sep­a­rate lat­er in image edit­ing. My rec­om­men­da­tion is to keep your his­togram dis­tri­b­u­tion out of the last right quar­tile of your his­togram band.

Hold­ing the tonal range together

Use the cus­tom white bal­ance that will be set by the tech­ni­cians who con­vert­ed your cam­era and nev­er alter it. If your white bal­ance is altered or if you set wrong­ly your image will appear a strong red or blue which makes image eval­u­a­tion on the back of your cam­era and pro­cess­ing tricky. Your pre­view image and raw file should dis­play a sepia tone. Avoid vast areas of green, such as fields of bar­ley or grass­lands. These con­tain huge amounts of chloro­phyll and will offer vir­tu­al­ly not tonal vari­a­tion in your fin­ished image, appear­ing as a block of grey.

Let­ting sim­plic­i­ty work

If you are used to look­ing at a scene where you would ordi­nar­i­ly reach for your grad­u­at­ed fil­ters, first­ly, try an expo­sure with­out them. Remem­ber, the cam­era sen­sor can­not see all the wave­lengths of light your eyes are see­ing and will prob­a­bly cope very well with­out them enabling you to sim­pli­fy your approach. Last­ly, when you con­vert your image file to black and white, the ini­tial image you will be faced with will look pret­ty life­less and flat. Do not give up here. Look at it as a ben­e­fit where you are not grap­pling with high­light and shad­ow prob­lems, and con­tin­ue to tease them out, arriv­ing at a beau­ti­ful­ly toned final image.

Beyond the clas­sic infrared look

Infrared for me is the plat­form that has replaced my beloved black and white film I used for over thir­ty years, and my con­vert­ed infrared cam­era goes every­where I go, and I can switch between colour and infrared as and when I choose, which for me, is com­plete free­dom. If you ever search online for infrared pho­tog­ra­phy, the results will most­ly look the same. Pho­tographs made in sun­light with deep blacks and bright whites. I am not stat­ing there is any­thing wrong with this, but I am con­vinced that there is so much more to infrared than a sin­gle approach in the same way there is not one approach to mak­ing any black and white photograph.