Top Five Tips - Introduction to Infrared Photography

With the lead up to Christmas now in full swing and my corporate photography commissions in Edinburgh winding down for the holiday period, I have decided to concentrate on infrared photography for this blog.  This week has been fairly busy mind you, with a conference photography commission in Edinburgh last week, probably the last one of 2016 and some newspaper photography in the Lothian area at the weekend and some event photography in Glasgow, with a bungee jumping at the transport museum this weekend.

Anyway back to the subject of the day.  Infrared photography can be very complex and there are a number of myths surrounding it, so as part of my regular blog, I aim to do a number of articles to help people starting out, in what is a fascinating photographic genre.  Today, I am going to concentrate on some basic issues before we go onto the technical stuff in later blogs - anyway, most of you know my opinion on photography, which is that it is 95% visionary and 5% technical.  so here are the five tips for the day.

1.  The easiest and best way to take infrared photographs in the digital age is to have a camera converted, this can cost form £250.00 - £300.00 depending on the model of the camera.  Having said this, to get an understanding of infrared, it wouldn't do any harm to practice with an non-converted camera first using a filter and long exposures.  I like to hand hold when I shoot infrared, so I prefer using a converted camera.

2. You can shoot infrared all year round, not just in the summer.  Although your time is limited due to lack of light, all you need is some sunshine and I am sitting here now in December with the sun splitting through my window.  You wont get the white tree effect to the same extent as spring and summer, but you can still catch blue sky and clouds, the light can also be very contrasty, which is good for infrared and it will force you to look for other subjects, ie metal can produce interesting infrared pictures, as shown in my scrapyard shots in the attached link http://www.colinwrightphotography.co.uk/p304082559

3. You don't need an expensive camera to produce good infrared results.  I use a small Lumix camera with relatively inexpensive lenses for infrared, partly because I want to carry my gear around with me all the time and I also think the smaller newer cameras are better suited for infrared conversion, with the results often better than larger DSLR bodies.  The other weird thing about infrared (and I cant really explain the reason) is that often the cheaper lenses perform better than more expensive ones.

4. Experiment, if you can shoot hand held and the sun is out, don't just take the clichéd white tree and sky shots, photograph people, cars, animals etc. The effects you get can often be unique and can set you apart from the crowd

5. You will need some software experience.  Photoshop preferably if you are shooting colour infrared, although for black and white, all you need to do is to convert to black and white and tweak the contrast, brightness etc.  Obviously you could write a book on software editing for infrared, but that is a brief starting summary.

Anyway, enjoy, more to come soon

Kind Regards

Colin

Colin Wright Photography