Ever since I started to teach myself photography just a bit more than 10 years ago, I loved the high contrast and surreal dreamy feeling of black and white infrared photographs. In fact, most of work has been usually done as black and white infrared. The first time I developed one in the darkroom, I was blown away and fell in love forever.
Without getting into all the details, infrared film captures a part of the light spectrum (wavelengths) that are not visible to the human eye. This is not about seeing in the dark with military-issue infrared goggles or some such thing. I suspect somehow they are related but I am no scientist to understand. For information check out the Infrared FAQ.
As you might guess, if our eyes cannot see infrared light, the camera cannot meter it. But film can capture it. With some work and a lot of bracketing you get photos like the one on the left below (sort of a bad scan of a print, but you get the drift). The picture beside it is a normal black and white film print scan of the same location/same day.
I became familiar with the film, how it worked, and with a camera loaded in complete darkness, and a red filter I was off to shoot like a mad man, many a time…and able to catch a good shot almost every time, with bracketing.
Then along came digital photography! The camera manufacturers put an infra filter in the digital sensors to remove infrared light rays because it causes noise for digital photos. This was looking complicated and you can read more about digital infrared here or follow items in this Google search.
There were software conversion programs, often called “Faux Infrared” because they could not exactly duplicate what the eye cannot see anyway; I tried special infrared filters and recalibrating white balances, but this extended exposure times, meaning I had to use a tripod….I shoot photos more freely than a tripod. Previous to this latest edition of Photoshop, I played with various formulas in channels and everything else…but I was not getting where I wanted. By the way, the current version of Photoshop (CS3) has the expanded black and white conversion tool that does include a set of conversions for infrared…they are not bad.
I really didn’t want to give up the black and white infrared and as such remained a film buff as the digital revolution proceeded.
Then I found Lifepixel.com and they have been my savior! I took an old digital SLR, sent it off to them and for a couple hundred dollars, I am back to shooting what I consider to be real and challenging black and white infrared images. For the adventuresome, Lifepixel also offers a do-it-yourself instruction page.
If you want to see some of this work, drop by and say hi on Flickr.