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Digital Infrared Photography

Infrared photography is capturing light that us humans can’t physically see. The human eye sees “visible” light between 400nm and 700nm, but infrared photography captures the light between 700nm and 900nm.

The spectrum of visible light, the wavelength of the light - Lena Lighting S.A.

Photo credit: Lena Lighting

The History of Infrared

Infrared photography was first published in 1910 by Robert Wood, who used an experimental film with long exposures to get the results. Infrared became common place in military tactics, as it was able to see toxic gas and past false greenery and camouflage.

one of the first infrared photographs

Robert Wood’s infrared landscape

Can All Digital Cameras Shoot Infrared?

A fair amount of digital cameras can shoot infrared, but a lot of the modern ones have a filter blocking these wavelengths out. To test whether or not your digital camera can shoot infrared, find a television remote and point your camera at the light on the end of it. This light communicates with the TV, and is a part of the wavelengths that humans can’t see. Look at your camera through the LCD screen and if you can see the light, then your camera will be able to shoot infrared well. If you can’t, then your camera may have a filter that blocks IR light from hitting the sensor.

What Do I Need?

To shoot infrared photography, you’ll need your camera that has been tested to shoot infrared, a filter (or converted camera, like this Canon 5D Mark II that we have available) and a tripod. The tripod is necessary because infrared photography requires a lot of light, so the shutter will need to stay open for longer than normal and it will need to be stable to be a clear photograph.

Infrared photography can be done two ways: by using an external IR filter like the Hoya R72, or by converting your camera and having a dedicated IR filter placed in front of the sensor. The most inexpensive way is to shoot with an external IR filter, with one that fits to the filter size of your chosen lens.

Shooting infrared is a lot like shooting black and white; you have more dependancy on the composition and the tones in the picture. It’s experimental and can create some awesome photographs.

Photo credit: Guillaume Dargaud

The Settings

Infrared photography needs lots of light. Follow these settings to get the best results:

  • Shooting with lots of sun! Midday is great for infrared
  • Put your camera in manual mode
  • Shooting in RAW is best, as it will give you more editing room
  • Set ISO between 100-400
  • Put the “Long Exposure Noise Reduction” setting to ON
  • The white balance should be daylight (5600K)
  • Set the exposure bracketing to +/-1 EV
  • Change the aperture to f/8
  • Ensure that autofocus is off – cameras can have a hard time autofocussing whilst shooting infrared, so manual focus is the way to go.
  • The shutter speed will need to be 20 seconds or more

Editing Infrared

RAW photos straight from the camera will often look overwhelmingly red, as seen in this Expert Photography article.

Photo credit: Andrea Minoia/Expert Photography

Processing IR photos is easy – lots of photo editing softwares (such as Adobe Lightroom) will have infrared presets.

Editing the infrared photos manually involves changing the colour saturations in different channels:

  • Choosing something in frame that should be white
  • Replacing red with blue and vice versa. And also splitting the green channel 50/50 red and blue.
  • The blue channel is where the most work is needed now. +90 green, +100 red, and -90 blue. This makes results look more dramatic.

There is also the option to put it straight into a black and white filter – it won’t look like the standard black and white.

Photo credit: J. Andrzej Wrotniak

These settings can be changed around depending on the desired look – there’s no one and done rule with this genre of photography. It’s an entire spectrum that we can’t see, so some really cool things can be done with it. It can be made to look more contrasty, more ghostly, or even keep some of that colour in the shot.

Photo credit: Adam Welch

The colour kept in infrared pictures can look psychedelic.

Nothing in infrared needs to be “realistic”, and that’s the beauty of it. Have fun!

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