Digital InfraRed

Looks like good old fashioned IR photography is making a comeback, in digital form.

It's amazingly easy. At least if you own a digicam that is IR sensitive. Fortunately the Nikon I own is one such beast. Being a DSLR it's disadvantage is I can't preview the image via the LCD.

The image above was adjusted in Photoshop to get a shot as close to my favorite IR film, Kodak's High Speed Infrared. The plus is I only have to screw on a filter, the Hoya R72 near-infrared filter. It's damn near opaque but once I compose the shot, the camera will still focus and I use aperture priority and I went with f/8 as it gives a better result with this lens than other openings.

You can also adjust different color layers, swapping red & green, and you'll get false-color images as well.


It's a lot simper than old-fashioned film IR photography. No more dragging a changing bag everywhere to load & unload the film in absolute darkness.

Konica has a near IR film I also use, in the 120 format. You can load this in the open daylight, but since I sold my 120 camera years ago, this is the next best thing.

The HOLGA

Long time ago, 1999 to be exact, I discovered a camera known as "The Holga"... A cheap plastic camera. A good search brings up this link about the cameras... The Holga

So I bought several... and after some work, I produced some interesting images. Like this pair of Tanya, using the 6x4.5 insert.

Another good image is this one:

Now having turned to digital, I don't have my darkroom to process the images I get with the Holga.

Using Photoshop CS3 and it's Lens Correction filter, I can create a "Holga-like" image in Photoshop when I shoot with my Nikon D200.

So I experimented with various pre-made actions and scripts... none gave me what I got with my Holgas, so I took a hard look at what each was trying to so, and made up my own process. The Lens Correction filter is the key, as the Holga's single element plastic lens has distortions that are unique to each camera.

Before

After

The technique is rather simple, really. I converted the image to B&W using a Photoshop Action for Agfapan-25 B&W film, . Then I used the Lens Correction to slightly distort the image outward, and gave it some edge vignetting - then I selected a small area to keep sharp, and added Lens Blur to the rest of the image.

So now I can see what I got and make adjustments without shooting a bunch of film and hoping I'll get something interesting...

New blog

Decided to open a new blog for my photography.

I'll post new images and ideas I'm trying out.

I'm going with an external blog system to avoid the spam problems associated with my last blog, where I spent far more time policing for spam comments than I was writing the dumb thing.

Check back or subscribe via your favorite program. I'll have new stuff posted shortly.