Infrared Photography

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2603781

Taken around the block. False color IR image. Yes, I blew the reds waaaay up because I like how they burn my retinas.

It's a "night vision" mode in a ruggedized mil-spec phone, so I assume it's supposed to be tactical or some garbage. But if it worked in daylight it would be a legit feature for me. (I have no idea if that's the case.)

Also they could definitely sell units to the "ghost hunter" market, which is definitely a thing as I've bought a couple interesting 3D-printed IR lights targeted at them.

Part of an ongoing project around flags in infrared.

Gear: Converted Canon RP, 15-30 RF lens, Kolari KV-FL1 flash.

My RF native kit to date has consisted of the 16mm f/2.8 and the 50mm f/1.8, plus sundry adapted lenses. While I'm extremely pleased with the performance of both those lenses, I did recently find that for landscape-y type scenes I was doing a bit more lens swapping than ideal.

So, after seeing that someone on flickr had some good IR results with the 15-30, I decided to give it a shot. (First time using a zoom lens in like a decade, I think.)

Initial impressions are that it's usable, but not ideal. There's a hotspot that kicks in at f/11-ish. It's somewhat dependent on the scene, so I suspect a lens hood might help (I have one on order.) Overall contrast is a little low, which is no big deal, and at the wide end, the edges can get a bit funky, which is not uncommon for IR.

(BTW, from what I could tell by trolling google, it looks like the 14-35 f/4 L has somewhat worse hotspot performance.)

Here's a hotspot comparison at f/8, 11, 16

This is one of my first IR pictures, taken with a converted Samsung NX mini.

Kolari IR Chrome filter on full-spectrum Canon RP, Canon RF16mm f/2.8

Stock/straight out of camera, the IR Chrome filter gives a pretty orange rendition to IR. Getting to a more traditional pink-magenta look requires a bit of color correction. Example correction in DXO:

The shift is easy, but it can get troublesome to apply in cases where there are visible orange or light brown objects in the scene. Untreated wood is particularly tricky and requires local edits.

Infrared image from a Lifepixel-converted Fuji XT-1 camera. 720nm filter used. Toronto, Canada.

Since there should be at least one IR photo post, right?

This is a US flag that some folks in Santa Clara, CA hoisted up a very tall palm tree. This photo shows off three of the fun things that infrared light does:

• Living foliage turns white because chlorophyll reflects infrared light very efficiently
• Clear skies turn dark, a feature infrared filters share with regular visible red filters
• Dyes and pigments behave unpredictably. US flags are a great way to demonstrate this because, unlike a piece of clothing, everyone knows what a US flag is supposed to look like. (This also impacts night vision stuff, as a result of which military folks have special patches that are intended to be legible in IR.)

This was shot with an original Canon 5D with a black and white IR conversion (720nm I think) and an old Nikon 105mm f/2.5 K-type.

I spotted this flag from Caltrain while riding to visit a friend in Santa Cruz, then spent a few hours using google street view to figure out where specifically it was located and how to get there.

Pinned post for links to lens IR performance/hotspot info

• Naturfotograf, an incredible older resource on mostly Nikon lenses, with great info on IR and UV performance
• Kolari Hotspot List, Not a ton of detail here, and some of it is contradictory since it's based on pretty casual user reporting of performance, but it's one of the bigger lists.
• More modern Nikon lens info for Z-mount users
• Samsung NX lenses

I don't know a thing about cine stuff, but a friend pointed out to me that this film was partially shot on infrared stock. Fun quotation here:

“We wanted the cane white because sugar is white — it was sugar,” according to Calzatti. “Urusevsky had used infrared before. Russia didn’t produce infrared film, so I came to a manufacturer in Kazan who made film strictly for the military – for shooting the other side of the moon, for spying on American objects. They hand-made infrared for us in what looked like a kitchen. It was of very high contrast and very low sensitivity — around 30 ASA — and it was on celluloid instead of tri-acetate. We had no infrared meter, and no infrared marks on the lens, so many times the results were unpredictable. After a while we just used our instincts, and we became friends with infrared. What you see in the film is okay, but we shot much footage to select from. Each scene was done for 15 or 20 times, so it never was filmed spontaneously.

Hi, folks. I'm sure this group is premature at this point because even the main photography communities on lemmy/kbin are not that active yet, but I thought it would be nice to have a place to park some resources and info about IR.

I'm a pretty casual photographer and I've been shooting infrared off and on for a while. (Here's my IR stuff on flickr) I've used unconverted and converted digital cameras and modern IR films like Rollei IR400. Current setup is digital with mainly a converted Canon RP and Ricoh GRIII.