Pixiq

INFRARED FLASH STORY

The Infernal Introduction

I'm going to get to the subject of this post, eventually.  If you already know whatever you want to know about infrared photography, just skip to the pictures, or go to the second section where I will finally talk about infrared flash photography with a modified for infrared digital camera. 

But if you can stand a bit of history, then read on.

A few years ago, feeling bored with my photographic endeavors, it struck me that I might pick up a roll of HIE.  HIE you may say.  What's that?  Well, it used to be a film that Kodak made for black and white photography.

I was at that time still shooting with the ancient and much loved Leica M3 and it turned out to be a perfect choice for infrared photography since it was a rangefinder and that meant that you could put an infrared filter on the lens, but still see your subject clearly through the viewfinder.

This isn't a post on the pros or cons of infrared photography.  That's for another time.  But it is necessary to just briefly, as briefly as I know state the obvious fact that infrared film is sensitive to some smallish segment of the spectrum. 

The Kodak film hasn't been in production for a while (which really is a shame) because it had one -- oh, there I go off on a tangent again.  But because it didn't have what they call an anti-halation layer light, especially specular light, had a way of entering the film, hitting the back of the camera and bouncing back through the film again creating halation. (There doesn't seem to be a brief way to get to the point of this post does there).

Halation doesn't mean bad breath - it means that the pinpoints of light would get a very pleasant glow.  I remember how thin the film felt as it was wound onto the reel to develop.

And since it was so sensitive, you really had to be careful when you loaded it into the camera.  I would bring a changing bag with me for loading and unloading the stuff. 

And so, with infrared film loaded, you would pick the filter for the lens.  There were lots of choices there depending on how narrow a piece of the visible and invisible spectrum you wanted to record.

Now, to get to the point.  When you put a filter on that's cutting nearly all light from reaching the film, you are going to find yourself shooting at very slow shutter speeds, and with your lens as wide open as possible. 

Two solutions for this came along.  The first was the use of infrared flash bulbs.  Yes, one of the most famous images in history, the movie-watchers with the stupid-looking 3-D glasses by Weegee was shot with infrared flash.

His flashbulbs were (if I remember correctly) regular flash bulbs that were dipped in some sort of solution that would coat them and once dried only allow a narrow spectrum of infrared light to be emitted.

Infrared flash combined with infrared film offered all sorts of possibilities.  The first one was the ability to shoot in the dark without being a general nuisance.  Since the human eye doesn't pick up infrared, when the infrared bulb popped it wasn't likely to attract much attention unless the viewer were looking right at it.

And from a photographers point of view - that wasn't something you'd want to do anyway because infrared flash does absolutely awful things to the eyeball.  If you thought that red eye was bad - you should see (hopefully I've posted at least one shot here) what the eye looks like when you pop infrared at it.

The second solution to working with infrared, came about with the introduction of the - yes - the digital camera.  Many digital cameras are actually very sensitive to infrared light, and manufacturers will put cut-out filters before the sensor to prevent infrared light from striking it.

Many early cameras, especially points didn't have strong enough cut-out infrared filters and if you put an infrared filter over the lens you could produce reasonable enough infrared images.

That's neither here nor there since the advent of companies that will take your favorite DSLR and remove the infrared cut-off filter and replace it with a filter to enable some mix of infrared light and visible light strike the sensor.

The beauty of this was that the now infrared camera could be used without putting a filter over the lens which meant that you could shoot at normal shutter speeds and f-stops and infrared photography became very hand-holdable.  Another benefit, and this is a big one - you could get a pretty good idea of what you were capturing and whether your exposure was okay, but looking at that screen on the back of the DSLR.

No more sweaty hands in the changing bag.  (Some people say they never did use them, others like me say they were needed, esp. on sunny days).  And you could adjust your exposures as you went along and this took pretty much all of the guess work out of infrared photography.

I know, it's a big subject and I'm skipping a bunch of things, but while I was shooting infrared film with the Leica rangefinder, I began to wonder about whether you might not recreate shots like Weegee had done in movie theaters and covering the night scene, with an electronic flash that had been modified to only emit infrared light.

That's when I did my search and came across a fellow by the name of Shane Elan at www.BeyondVisible.com that was offering just such a thing.  Shane was (and at least at the time of this writing is) an expert at modifying some electronic flash units to emit either UV or Infrared Light and that was just what I was interested in. 

Before I contacted him, I had experimented with sticking an infrared gel in front of a flash - taping it on.  This worked sort of - but had it's own issues.  Namely, that if you prevent most visible light from escaping the flash - that energy is going to turn into heat - and heat has a way of melting gel filters.  It's just not a great way to do it.

And you definitely don't want to modify a flash unit yourself, unless you really know what you're doing since they use capacitors to store up the energy for that flash, and you are in for a dangerous shock if you become the ground for all that energy.

Continuing… As I say, at that time, I was using Kodak HIE film.  I bought a Vivitar 285HV Flash, and Shane put a filter in that was matched for my HIE infrared film.

It took a lot of testing, to figure out what settings to use on the infrared flash to properly expose the film.  Eventually, I made a little chart for myself which I taped to the back of the flash.

In the gallery above, I've labeled the shots as film or digital.  Because, while I was doing my work with infrared film and infrared flash, times were moving on and the modified for infrared DSLR was now available.

So I took my first digital camera, the Canon Rebel, sent it off to be converted to infrared and again, picked a segment of the spectrum that would be wide enough to pick up whatever the infrared flash emitted.

And that, as they say, is that. 

You continue to have the advantages of the infrared flash and infrared media combination:

1) Shoot in the dark without drawing attention to yourself.  If you look directly at the flash while it is firing, you will see a gentle and soft puff of red light.  It is really so slight, and so unusual, that as a subject, you really aren't sure what happened.

2) Stop motion.  If you are in a spot where all of the ambient light is not being picked up, such as in a subway car - only the parts of the subject that reflect infrared are picked up. 

3) It's quite easy to convert to black and white.  I could write more about this in a separate piece.

4) You can get very interesting effects, even when shooting in broad daylight, and use the infrared flash for fill light without anyone seeing the pop of the flash.

5) If you are photographing somewhere that flash is not allowed (uhm most museums) you can still shoot with this flash.  I've done it many times in various museums.  True, guards see the flash and warn me that it is not allowed, but I simply say that I won't use it.

6) You can try and be Weegee.  No kidding.  I did try to recreate some of the movie theater work that Weegee did - but the theaters I picked were pretty small and I couldn't really get myself in the right position, but with so much 3-D these days, it could be done in the right theater.

7) You can walk around the streets at night, and photograph scenes, if the subject is close enough, without drawing attention to yourself.

It is really an interesting subject because as a photographer, one of the things that interested me from the beginning was the idea of photographs showing, somehow, another world beyond what we normally see.  And that is one realm of infrared, whether with flash or without it.

8.  And finally, with the advent of HDR, there are a lot of very interesting experiments to be done with infrared cameras, with or without infrared flash.  I have been waiting for Spring to do this sort of experimentation.