Tag Archives: Riparian

Digital Infrared Workshop

One of the truly significant changes digital photography has brought us is the simplicity of shooting infrared (IR). Old School analog IR shooters had a series of steps that required best guesses to be made and correspondingly has a rather high hit or miss result. First of all, you had to be careful loading the camera since the film could fog in bright outdoor conditions. Then, focus and exposure issues had to be addressed.

The Infrared weekend kicked off on Friday evening with a free lecture by Neil Miller and Siegfried Rempel, shooting started at the Gilbert Riparian on Saturday morning, followed by process in the Digital Lab in the afternoon. Sunday we printed images and reviewed the work on the Crit Wall.

Siegfried printed an image from a digital negative on to hand coated  printing out paper, and demonstrated digital infrared capture, to digital negative, to an alternative photographic process. This could have also been printed using cyanotype, platinum, gum bichromate, etc.

Here is a link to the original workshop information.

So what is the visual difference with infrared? The primary difference is that the camera is photographing in response to living plants in an area of the light spectrum the human eye cannot see. Plants will often reflect greater proportions of infra-red and appear to be lighter in value. The sky, devoid of reflected infra-red will appear a dark value similar to the effect of shooting black and white film through a dark red filter. Clouds tend to show greater modulation and gradation and often “pop” in the image.

The following infrared images are by Margaret Wright

The following infrared images are by Richard Fee

The following infrared images are by Neil Miller, and the featured image for this post is by Neil Miller