Category Archives: Infrared

Cotton Candy Museum

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This is the Botanic Museum at the Lund University Botanic Gardens in Lund, Sweden:

Cotton Candy Museum

Or at least, the above is a view of the museum through a 665 nm infrared filter (with a red / blue color channel swap and other tweaking).

Using less processing on the same photograph results in a view that’s (to my eye at least) a bit more sinister in appearance:

The Botanic Museum at the Lund University Botanic Gardens; Lund, Sweden. Seen through a 665 nm IR filter.

In regular visible light, it looks more like this:

One of the nice things about photographing in infrared is that it works well in bright mid-day sunlight (which tends to be less flattering for other uses). The flip side of this coin is that when you’re visiting places like Scandinavia, you may not get bright mid-day sunlight all that often.

1965 Corvette Stingray

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Every year, one of our local cemeteries hosts a car show. Folks from a wide area bring their classic vehicles for display, and you can walk through the lineup for free while… I don’t know… pondering your mortality? I can’t explain it, but the juxtaposition works somehow.

Here’s an infrared (530nm) photograph of a 1965 Corvette Stingray taken at the 2023 Fairmount Cemetery Car Show.

1965 Corvette Stingray

EXIF:
Olympus E-PL8 camera converted to full spectrum
M.Zuiko 14-42mm EZ lens, 530nm IR filter
ISO 320, 14mm, f/9, 1/60 sec

Fun with infrared light and modern architecture

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Over the past few years, I’ve dabbled here and there with infrared (IR) photography, but didn’t take it very seriously until I recently took an online course in the subject from Derrick Story (a.k.a. The Nimble Photographer). If you’re at all interested in IR photography, I can highly recommend the seminar — you’ll learn a lot from the instruction, and quite a bit as well from your fellow students.

In particular, one of my fellow students recommended taking IR photos in office parks with mature vegetation. You can, he said, get some nice results with the architecture, windows, and greenery.

So as my first example of this subject matter, here’s the Pacific Western Bank building in the Denver Tech Center (Denver, Colorado):

PWB iPhone

The above is a quick reference photo I took with my iPhone — it’s poorly framed but still a good comparison for the images below.

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Strange planet

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The Flatirons, just west of Boulder, Colorado. But seen in infrared, and with some color tweaks in post-processing.

Strange planet

I love the Flatirons, but they’re one of those subjects that is exhaustively photographed here in Colorado. So, how to make a shot of them that doesn’t look like a million others? Oh, and I went hiking on kind of a “blah” sort of morning — light overcast, some snow on the ground (but not enough to really set off the rock). My regular color photos taken with a regular digital camera were… underwhelming.

Fortunately, I also took along my E-PM2 camera body (which I’d had converted to full spectrum imaging), and a 720 nm infrared filter. Do a little color channel swapping, fiddle a bit with levels to separate the rock from the trees, and presto — you’re on a distant world.

EXIF:
Olympus E-PM2 camera (full spectrum conversion), M.Zuiko 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 EZ lens, 720nm filter
ISO 200, 19mm, f/8.0, 1/250 sec