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.

Digital black and white infra-red on the other hand shows you the properly focused image immediately and allows you exposure adjustment at the time of exposure with a clear indication of what you have photographed.

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 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 two images below show the color scene and the infrared equivalent. Both images are unprocessed digital images taken on a Sony F828 camera.

The workshop will begin on Friday evening at Art Intersection with an informal lecture and demo which is open to the public at no charge. You are invited to bring your digital camera with you to see if it can “see” in IR. Some camera manufacturers have added an internal cut off filter to prevent the camera sensor from picking up the IR.

Saturday we will start the day at an outdoor venue, To Be Announced, to allow participants to shoot and generate images. We will demonstrate the exposure controls and ensure everyone has images to process and print back at the Art Intersection Computer Lab.

Saturday afternoon we will be working in the AI computer lab processing and printing images from the shoot. A variety of ink jet papers will be available for students to use. Printing format will be limited to letter size images to allow everyone access to the printers.

We will also demonstrate the transformation of the digital IR images onto a digital negative format and print the digital negative on an alt process paper to illustrate the cross over possible from digital shooting to traditional alt process printing.

Sunday is an open day, participants can continue printing their IR images. The workshop staff will be available Sunday to clarify and assist participants with their final printing.