Infrared Photography

I have had only one experience of infra red photography. The pictures you will see below are from that one roll effort that I put myself through. Infrared photography is a pain in the ass. At the end of it all, you get blurry black and white pictures with a ghostly ethereal feel. Nice once in a while, but generally not worth the trouble. What trouble am I talking about? For starters, you have to load your roll of Kodak Infrared into your camera in the dark, because for some reason you can't expose the bare cassette. Processing is also preferably done quickly after shooting, to prevent other sources of infrared getting to the film and spoiling it. During photography itself, exposure is arbitrary. You follow the guidelines in the little paper that is included with the film. With this aspect, I gave up trying to decide what and how to meter after awhile and shot the whole roll at 1/125sec at f/16 or f/11. Then there's that deep red filter you have to buy. You can recognize it by the (IR) designation on the barrel and also by the fact that when you try to look through it, you see nothing but an opaque deep red (hence the name). I had the unfortunate burden of having to hold my Hoya deep red filter over the lens before every exposure, because the filter thread of my Leica lens (39mm) was a rare one that filter manufacturers don't care for. Step down rings were also not available. This therefore necessitated the use of a tripod, another pain in the ass. Because of the slowness of my set up, I was forced to find stationary subjects to photography. I decided on the Botanical Gardens, since foliage was suppose to turn out nicely on IR film. So here it is my first effort. Will I do it again? Not in the foreseeable future, but since a Hoya deep red filter resides in my equipment cabinet perhaps it will see the light of day sometime again. Besides there's that neat flash trick that you can do with IR film.

 

A popular spot for wedding photographers.

 

 

 

 

Just for fun, I wanted to see how IR film turns out indoors. What do you think?

 

 

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