I'm going to order some of the Ilford Ortho, which has just come out also. Cool. Yeah, Ortho, that'll probably lead us right into our topic of the day. I'm already rolling. This is… No, it is the 3rd of August, 2024. I'm Chris and this is the future of photography. The future of photography. Here we go. We're back with… Hello. Hello. Another podcast. I decided to jump right into this discussion. Why not? Kick this off. How's everyone doing? We're doing well. Not bad. Not bad. Considering. It's the best, pretty good. No, come on. I'm British, right? Not bad. It's actually right up, way up there, right? When I lived in Ireland for a while, the usual answer was not too bad, not too bad. Yeah, you know everything's really bad. You know that things are really bad in Ireland when they say it's grand. It's just like, oh no, it's not that bad, is it? All right, we have an episode on infrared photography of all things. And Jeremiah, you're the one who triggered this. Why? Why on Earth? You know, possibly it's because I wanted to learn from you guys because having shot infrared for many, many years, infrared film with various filters and have a converted camera, which I have used and done some editing in Photoshop in terms of flipping the colors and adjusting the hues and whatnot, I do not consider myself in any way, shape, or form an expert, even a experienced intermediate. I can say that I've done it, but I don't have a lot of control over it. And yet, I find myself drawn to it. And so just, you know, this past week, possibly just to refresh my sensibilities and to move away from my AI investigation, though I'm sure I'll circle back with the finished image. I thought I would just open this up for a wider discussion because it is a fascinating look at what the eye sees, what it doesn't see, what film sees, what it doesn't see, how to filter various colors and explore the world in a somewhat different look and feel. So while one might kind of run away from certain nature compositions with infrared, I think you're always looking for how surreal one can change, especially chlorophyll-based nature. Just the way it kind of reflects their wavelengths and there are several companies that do conversions. And by conversions, you know, I mean that you take your camera and you create a permanent infrared filter back, actually they remove. So let me try to kind of technically define infrared photography for a minute because that probably helps. So we have a light spectrum, it goes from anywhere in the ultraviolet into blue and green and yellow into red and then infrared, which is, infrared is outside of what we can see. So making that visible is probably, makes things look different. Everyone who's seen infrared photos makes things look different. And then what is typically done is because digital cameras filter infrared light out, they have a filter in front of the sensor, that's the conversion. So you take that filter out, you replace it with just a pane of glass, pretty much. And then the camera has an extended range. It looks beyond your visible range into the infrared and then what's often done is you take an additional filter on the lens that blocks out anything that is red or other parts of the visible spectrum. So you make the camera only see the infrared. And you mentioned shooting with film, with film it's fairly easy because film doesn't come with an infrared filter on it. So if you have a film stock that is very sensitive in the infrared spectrum, then you just put one of these blocking filters on and you get only the infrared spectrum on the film. But with a digital camera, you need this additional modification most of the time to take out that filter. So modifying a camera, as you said, is a permanent thing, right? The camera is open to the infrared forever. There's no whoops. You're in it. But I took the camera that I didn't use that often, you know, a three quarter Lumix. And I was so happy with the conversion. I think Kalari did it. So it's a company you send it to, you tell them what kind of a conversion you want and then they do all the- I did full spectrum because I wanted the most control based on secondary filters. So that means they open it up and then you have to block out whatever you want blocked out. That's right. Yeah. You generally use it with a filter and we could talk about those filters in a bit. But I thought that what was- what's interesting about infrared is more metaphysical because you know, we were used to seeing the world, we look at a tree, plant life and we go, that's green. And we think that green, that is reality. But that's a subjective reality to how human vision and light and our brain interpret that. And we can all kind of more or less agree, though we all see green in a slightly different way. I had my cataracts done last year. And when they were done, the green was much more vivid and it tended a little bit towards the blue compared to a four, which was a little bit yellow because of the haze of the lens. All this is meant to say that when you look at things through an infrared sensibility, you go like, oh, those leaves are orange or those leaves are white or those leaves are red. And we think, oh, that's surrealistic. That's weird. It's unreal. But in fact, it's as real as anything else. It's just the way we are able to see, like many animals can hear in very, very high frequencies. So we can't, and as we age, that those frequencies narrow. It's just a way of kind of looking at the world in a different way, and in many ways just questioning how we see reality to begin with. And I think also when you divvy it up into color and black and white, additional image possibilities kind of emerge in a different way of seeing emerges. And all this goes to kind of use photography as a way of questioning reality, of understanding reality, and understanding the way we subjectively interact with our own vision. So I think that is really kind of the philosophical underbelly here. It's a bit akin to just black and white photography versus the way we see the world in color. So that's an abstraction, a different kind of abstraction of what we see there. That's right. In fact, in one of my art tomes, you know, art is a statement. I said that if you look at a portrait by Rembrandt, in all its fine detail, lighting and color, we go, "Oh, that's a really extraordinary painting." Whereas we look at an Ansel Adams photo of Yosemite, we go like, "Oh, that's real." Even though his work is very, very darkroom-oriented, burning dodge and et cetera, and the abstraction of black and white relative to the color of Rembrandt and the detail. So in the way I see it, I mean, Rembrandt is more realistic portrayal of what we consider reality and Ansel Adams, much less, more abstract. And I think that's something that, as we have become used to photography as representing "reality," the whole aesthetic of photography is based on the assumption of reality, and that's why, with AI, things start to get a little more confusing. By the way, there's a lot in it. Can I deliver a quote by Groucho Marx, because we're talking about reality. Groucho Marx said that he was not fond of reality, didn't like reality, but at the end of the day, it's the only place to get a decent meal. It's interesting, because infrared photography is real, right? In the sense that what it's seeing is what the camera is reacting to is the emission of electromagnetic waves, or the reflection of whatever it is you point the camera at. It happens to be slightly outside the range that we humans normally see, but I'm totally with you on the ice thing. I had one eye done, I had one cataract done, and now I have eyes with different white balances and different frequency responses. How long did you take your brain to adapt so you don't notice that anymore? So we have talked about, I forget which show this is, because this was a couple of years ago, when I had it done, and we talked about it, it was roughly, I was at 80, 90% there after about six weeks, it was quite an experience, watching your brain reprogram itself, watching from the inside your brain reprogram itself to see, but I still see, it's a cooler white balance with the eye that I had operated on, and I can see greater frequencies, and not infrared, actually the other end, I can see more into the UV with my plastic eye, with my bionic eye, if you like, than I can with my natural eye, even to the point where if you go to somewhere where they use UV, like sort of your glow in the dark disco lighting kind of places, I first noticed it in a bowling alley that thought it was a discotheque, right? And I say discotheque very much tongue in cheek, right, it was a really old fashioned looking place, it wasn't, but it was like painted black, but there was all this glow in the dark paint and stuff like that, and I thought that's a bit weird, I can see the lights, right, that I can see the dark lights, I was like, how is that a thing? And I realised I can only see the dark light with one eye, with one eye, it was dark, and then the eye that I'd had fixed, it was actually visible. So I'd say, right, the infrared photography is definitely is very definitely a reflection of reality. And I'm picking up on only like one thin strand and everything you said, Jeremiah, but it's just, but it was the same, it was the same for me, I had both eyes done, but in that three week differential when I had one eye done and when I not, it was really vivid. You know, one was sort of a kind of a warm filter, like sunglasses, slightly warm, the other one was much, much cooler relatively. And you know, it took maybe three weeks where I really stopped thinking about it actively, and then another three weeks until I completely forgot it. Now, you know, everything looks quote normal. So in the brain, it's amazing. All in the brain. Perception in general is mostly a brain thing. How do we get back to the topic? Well, let me move a bit away from the from the physiological to the philosophical side this way. I just look at some of the challenges when you want to shoot infrared. Let's go with tech, because it's not easy. It's not simple. You can't just point your camera and autofocus and click it. Shall we talk film first? Because why don't we talk about that? Sure, sure. So, yes, focusing is different because what you see is not what you get, you have to adjust. So working in a deeper depth of field is recommended. Fine focus can be very tricky. You don't want to rely on autofocus nor can you rely on white balance, though often hitting a gray card before you go out is probably a good idea to get your white balance because you'll find it's very hard to grab an absolute white. So that's that is one of the very first things that I learned shooting film in terms of exposure. And focusing. Okay, so you have this you have this blocking filter on the camera. So you cannot do manual focus because when you look through the viewfinder, all the visible light is blocked out. So you can take that filter off focus, put that filter on, but then you're still not where you need to be because different wave lengths of length of light get focused at different depths, which is why lenses are so complicated because they have to correct for otherwise you get chromatic aberration, you get these these color fringing things. It's different wavelengths being focused to different depths. So the corrected the lenses are not made for to correct for for infrared because normally you don't shoot infrared. So there is depending on the kind of infrared filter that that will typically come with a correction factor where they say, okay, you have to focus slightly different to make this in focus. And then you put the filter back on and then you have to do a lot of math to get the exposure right because you are now looking through something that doesn't let a lot of light through only a very thin sliver of the wavelengths. So that will mean will typically mean you have a lot of like a lot of long exposures. And then you have to have film stock that can handle that because there's the Schwarzschild effect that will not linearly expose film for longer exposures. So we're talking about a whole little book of things to think about, right? To avoid those tribulations, it's just easier. If you're starting off in this world, just use a wide angle lens and shoot towards the middle to back of the f-stop. Yeah, as you said, lots of depth of field will help you there. Absolutely. Yeah, so there's an automatic correction. You know, on my Lumix, I mean, it is interchangeable, but I tend to use a wide angle lens there. And white balance is a whole other learning curve. But when you're shooting film, and I remember shooting several fashion pieces using, I think it was an infrared slide film. It's been a while. I have them in my archive. But they turned out absolutely stunningly beautiful. The skin was purple. I forget what kind of filter I used. But it was sharp. It was beautiful. It was surreal. And it was unusual. And I don't know if too many manufacturers are still making infrared film there's infrared slide film. I don't think there's any slide from no negative film. Maybe I certainly haven't done a dive on that. Typically in the in the black and white, you will get some infrared films. Yeah. But that's also one. Sorry, that's also one reason why a lot of the infrared photography is landscape photography, architecture photography. And I think I've never seen infrared macro. No, nor again, I think the focusing. It's a focusing issue. Yeah. Very, very difficult. Sorry, Adrian. No, I was going to say, I'm not aware of any particular products, but actually, Ilford or Harmon, I should say, make a film or this that called, he's called something like SFX, which is a pseudo infrared film. It's a black and white film, but it's just a little bit extra sensitive into the infrared. So it gets you, it gets you a flavor of it. But without the complexity, because you can shoot it just with a red filter on it, basically. And that's a half way step. It's not true in infrared photography, but it's a half way step. And there's all kinds of post processing that allows you to emulate somewhat. You know what I mean? There is ways of inverting the color curve. When you imported, say, into Photoshop and you look at your histogram and just completely reversing where all the colors are, to give you kind of the first dynamic. And then you can replace colors and adjust to achieve a look that's quite controllable. Infrared is also a very interesting choice for shooting at times when you would typically not go out and shoot. I'm talking noon. I'm talking lots of sunlight. I'm talking lots of infrared. And even even just a film or a camera that has this extended range without the blocking filter, if you go out during the high noon, then you will end up with more detail in the shadows, because there's a lot of infrared there that the camera then can all of a sudden see. So these harsh shadows, these harsh contrasts that you get at that time of day, all of a sudden get a lot more definition in the shadows, which is another cool aspect of infrared photography. Also shooting infrared at night is also very interesting. You get very surprising results, especially the difference between urban and rural based on heat and how that affects what you see and what's coming off, you know, glass or skin is also very interesting, especially in black and white. One could get almost a marble-like texture on the surface of skin. Very, very interesting. But again, the exploration of film then gives way to a converted cameras. And I'm not sure that there are settings for infrared, artificial settings for infrared, though I can imagine that you could adjust an AI, you could build an AI in a camera to artificially rearrange the spectrum. But it would be an emulation rather than something that was actually a true visual of what we call reality. Converting a camera is interesting because then, especially full spectrum, which allows the camera to see all, as Chris pointed out, of the infrared "light" that's coming off a subject. And then you control what ends up on the chip by different color filters. And they are radically different. I mean, they range from sort of a lavender to a deep blue to one that's called candy, which is really, really interesting. And we'll talk about that in a bit. But those filters and experimenting with them really give you the base for importing those into your editor. Because I think that coming off a digital image of a converted camera is really like you get what I'd consider a digital "negative" that is the beginning of the process. And depending on what filters you use, it's going to look very different. Once you're in Photoshop or Neo or Luminar or whatever you're using, that's where you have a lot of fun with your colors and histograms and adjustments there to achieve what it is you're looking for or just to experiment with what is possible. And that's a lot of fun. The interesting thing is I'm sure people are selling actions for Photoshop that basically make this an automatic process. But I think that the exploration of what color is is something that really yields a lot of benefits once you take a photo, import it and start to play around with what you would think is subjective. And then you finally realize that all color is subjective. And the same is true of black and white in terms of your gradations and your grays and also your exposure. And that begets a huge amount of opportunity. So I look at this as a step to a lot of elaborate editing to achieve the final result of an image that stands on its own. I think I have to say, because I'm talking this purely from a theoretical point of view because I've never actually tried in photos. So I am intrigued. But what I've read about it is that there's quite a lot of sophisticated color management in the post processing if you're doing color infrared, right, perhaps slightly less if you're doing black and white. But are you playing around with hues? Are you swapping hues? Are you picking a range, say like the green of the foliage and saying actually, you know, I wish that to be interpreted in a separate way. Are you choosing color ranges as a mask and then changing the hue of that? How does that work? Channel swapping. You will typically swap a couple of channels. I haven't done infrared photography very deeply, but it involves switching around things in your editor of choice. It's a good teacher. It will teach you a lot of different editing chops like you know more about. Exactly. That's one of the reasons that I kind of brought this up is that the learning curve is both fun. It's not tedious. It's a lot of fun to go. What if I move this or identify this color, swap it out for another, invert the curve completely, crush it. But your learning tools that you can apply to what we would consider normal photography. It adds more tools to your creative toolbox. That's right. And you start to see, oh, you know, like I don't like that shade of blue. I like it blue, but I don't like exactly how vivid it is. You can make a luminosity mask and dial it back, but it really helps define the relationship between effectively color, subjective color, adjusted color, and final result. And then, of course, if you're going to print it, there's yet another, to jump through, but it is something that I highly recommend as a learning tool. It would be interesting to see if just infrared film is available in any way for people just to pick up a role, you know, put on a blue filter or a red filter, or, you know, one of the many. And just experiment, you know, bracket your exposures, bracket, even you're focusing, you're at the field, move it into your editor and start to play, you're going to learn a lot and have fun with it. And there's also plenty of videos about it. So it's easy to find good information. Yes. Yeah. Well, how about, how about an infrared group shot? I'm not sure we can sit still enough long enough for that. Can we do that? Do we have the power? Do we have the technology? Not remote. So this is your converted camera? This is my converted camera, obviously. It looks stylish. You know, the blue lens is kind of a hippie glasses kind of feel. Yes, this lens, this is the IR Chrome, it's supposed to be, it's considered the kind of strong man. It gives you the most opportunity in post. Now, you know, if they flip it around, what does it do when you shoot a picture off the screen? This is what what it looks like. A lot of magenta in the picture. Just like. You know, you're not showing the picture now. Oh, I'm not. Wait a second. Yeah. Oh, sorry. There it is. There you go. Okay. But you can't really see how vividly red it is. I mean, it's red. And, and a computer screen is not your ideal subject. Of course not, because it's it's a self self self lighting thing and not a reflective kind of thing. So it takes a lot of the blue of the screen that converts it to red and then, you know, all the rest of it. So just just let me ask a few quick, how does that work? So you've got a camera with your sensor in the camera is sensitive to a wider range of frequencies than usual, right, including extending into the infrared. Yes. You've then put a blue filter. Think it was a blue filter as long as the colors are from your video feed coming through. Okay, you've got a blue filter on that. So a blue filter will only allow blue light through. Is that right? Is it a blue filter? It's not exactly a blue filter. No, it's it's more on the on the purple end. It has to be more on the infrared. No, actually it has to block visible light or part of the visible light. See if you right, maybe you get a sense of it. It's not pure blue. You can see a little green and the camera, the white balance in your camera changes everything anyway. So it's really hard to show here. And it's the thing is with infrared photography. It's a very nuanced kind of thing that has a lot of possibilities. So by the choice of the filter, you decide what goes on to the sensor, what goes and what stays off the sensor. So take take you take an old, an old TV remote. They have this black piece of plastic on it, which is in fact translucent to infrared. But if you hold it in front of your eye, you don't see anything through it because it blocks the visible light and there's little infrared LED in it that can shine through that. And that's something similar. But with with lots of variation, lots of nuance, different kinds of filters will do different kind of blocking and lighting through. So you decide by using the filter and by opening up the sensor to more of the bandwidth of the spectrum. And let's not forget white balance because then white balance changes everything again in the digital realm. It's easier to do in film or let's maybe not easier, but it's more straightforward to do it. It's more stable in film. But if you're going to shoot with infrared, some cameras will have a built in gray card, but even that doesn't work on a convert camera. So what you really need to do is carry a gray card and take your automatic white balance from it in that light. And then you at least have a neutral start position. Right. So you take a photo of the gray card in a normal way and then when you get back to post production, you can say that that's what that color is. Well, you like this camera and many of them have the ability to apply a gray card to a standard white balance. So I'm shooting a great yes, and it helps you set a custom white balance in your camera. That's it. It's a custom white balance. And even moving the kind of Kelvin numbers, they don't really help. It gets more confusing there anyway. But Lord Kelvin would be quite upset about that. He kind of invented that whole thing. Half a glass go is built out of the body you made out of inventing that kind of thing. And then after you have played with it for long enough, you'll get to take pictures like these with what we call the wood effect, which is where foliage, green trees and bettles look like white and they have very different kind of feeling to them. So it yields some really surreal kind of outcomes. Yeah, it's definitely cool. I like it. Yeah. All right. Enough about it. Next week, Jeremiah, you'll have to share with us a couple of photos that because if you've just picked it up this morning and you go out for a walk late, whatever, share us a couple of photos in the teafop gallery and what will happen next week. I will. I will. And I may try and dig out some of my early infrared that are languishing in my archive up there. So last question, because I know it was probably going to move on to picks of the week shortly. But one last question, if I don't have a converted camera, is there a way I can sort of pseudo play with these ideas? Yes and no. There are emulations that are available. I know that there are videos how to achieve the infrared look, but they're very labor-intensive because you really have to adjust color by color everything. Now I've done this. I've emulated orthofilm. I did it's, in fact, it's on my website. The folios called Blackland and the skies are black, the mountains and the snow are white. They're landscape photographs that they're almost ortho or infrared somewhere in between, but they were all done manipulated in post. I shot them with the normal camera, normal film camera and converted them and really did sort of a deep dive in editing them and printing them. So yes, there is a way, but I would do a search and see if you could find some infrared film and pick up a filter. That's probably the easiest way. I'm not, if there's an old camera that you have lying around. They have one or two. I think those are, depending on cost, and I don't know who does it locally in Britain, there's usually a few places that do it in each country and have it converted because it's a nice bit of kit to have. Again, if it's just a boat anchor of a camera sitting on a shelf, I don't think the pixel strength is that important. And nowadays, we did talk about this last week a bit that moving a sort of a lower pixel count image to an emulated high with gigapixel or multiple multiplex of different softwares to achieve a kind of a larger print that's now very much possible. So I don't think we're that restricted. Also, at this time, a lot of people might have an old DSLR on their shelf somewhere that's collecting dust because they swap to a mirrorless system. Google for companies that do infrared conversions because they will often list the type of cameras or the specific models that are easy to convert and there's a chance that someone has this old camera. I'm not really using it anymore and maybe the camera will get a second life by having a conversion. So onto the picks because Jeremiah's pick is straight from the infrared world. You have the candy chrome filter, the one that you just showed us. And here's an introduction to it and some conversion techniques. Yeah, this is a very interesting site. Also, Kalari does conversions and they sell all manner of filters, very, very high quality. You can read this about using channel swapping, creating lots in your lightroom, what each of these will look like, how to kind of bring out the best. So it's not something that is difficult to learn and you can just follow along with it and you don't need a lot of gear. But it really does give you an amazing sense of the subjectivity of reality. Certainly does. Which, of course, is where I live. All right. My pick is along the lines of film and it is about Harmon, the company behind Ilford and other films and papers because that's relatively breaking news. They have announced that they're making a huge investment in film manufacturing. I think several millions in there, what's the site again? Mobberly, which is their, I guess, their home base. Yeah, it is. They're manufacturing plant mobiles in Cheshire, the sort of northwest of England. Not far from everywhere. And they're investing in new machinery and new techniques and things. They're modernizing their film manufacturing, which is a good sign. I mean, a company, you've seen over the last, I think since film was pronounced dead, you've seen a lot of companies using their old machines or buying old machines from other companies, building new machines for film processing. I think that's a first since, I don't know, around 2000 maybe. Is the Phoenix, is the Phoenix film by Harmon, is that produced on these new machines? No, it's not. It's still an older equipment, but they're now investing because they're, yeah, because they see a future in film. It's cool. I know Harmon didn't, nearly didn't make it through the death of film. As an organization, they very much struggled. So actually to have them now strong enough to be investing in new manufacturing equipment is fantastic. An analog to that, no pun or very much a pun intended, an analog to that is LPs, vinyl, outsold CDs this year. Did they? Which, is this due to the resurgence of LPs or due to the death of CDs? Probably both a bit, right? I think both. And also the rise of Taylor Swift. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. People listening to cassettes now as well, which I haven't gone back to. I don't think I have a cassette player anymore. Oh, there are artists, Adrian, that are only working in a track. I still have some old mixtapes. I do. All right, last but not least, Adrian, you brought us a gallery. Yeah, particularly actually a show. So this is the Sachi Gallery in London. Many people, I'm sure, listening to the podcast will know the name. They have an exhibition on at the moment called Beyond Fashion, which is a collection of a range of artists and a range of time periods. But it's very much the, I don't know what you call it, the avant-garde fashion photography scene. And certainly, very high-end cultural advertisements. This is not your biosorted role from the bakers, kind of an avatar. This is fashion stuff and conceptual stuff, all sorts of things going on. So yeah, it runs, I think, for another couple of months. So anybody who can get to London to see it, I'm going to try and get some tickets myself. That looks great. Looks absolutely great. Awesome. I like that. Infrared there? Any infrared there? I don't know. I haven't been yet. Maybe. Who knows? Anyway, that brings us to the end of this episode. I do have a few roles of infrared film, which I have used in the past without a visible light blocker on it. And those are nice too. To extend the range that is visible on black and white. That's a pretty cool thing, especially when you're shooting at noon. So anyway, that is it for today. We are the future of photography. We are online. Talk to us in our Discord. That's a good place if you have done any infrared photography to let us know. Yeah, you have to be good to see it. Yeah, we'll be back in a week from now until then everyone. Take care and see you. Bye. You've been listening to The Future of Photography. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your other podcasts. Find the show notes and more information at thefutureofphotography.com. [Music]
