Infrared 100

Thermal video of Concordia shipwreck

2012-01-17T15:23:00.001Z

Poignant images from the Concordia shipwreck have been released taken with what I assume to a thermal camera mounted on a helicopter. They are described as 'night vision' but I think they are thermal (or composite), with a black and white palette that makes white cold and black warm. You can see the black (warm) passengers and crew making their way down the side of the cold (white) hull.

As you might imagine, the wreck of the Titanic a century ago triggered research into remote detection of icebergs, notably a bolometer with which the horizon can be scanned. Since the bolometer only needs to scan a single defined line it is practical to try and use such a device: a bolometer only detects temperature remotely at a single point. Unfortunately it didn't seem to work, presumably because icebergs are at pretty well the same temperature as the sea and so wouldn't show up with the kind of bolometers available a hundred years ago.

As late as 1934 the American liner Manhattan was fitted with a fog camera, which automatically took an infrared photograph ahead every 50 seconds and then developed and printed it. The hope being that this system would give an early warning of obstacles in haze and fog. The liner's captain reported that the system had indeed been useful in a blizzard and in fog but remarked that it could not be used at night until "ships, lighthouses, and buoys are equipped with infra-red beams". But it was already clear that infrared photography would not penetrate fog and a Times special correspondent, explaining how what could be photographed was dependent on particle size, commented that the Manhattan voyage had "not been suitably foggy for a real test to be made".

Modern thermal imaging cameras are very capable of distinguishing between sea and either objects floating or surface obstructions and the video gives some indication of this. Note that the exposed parts of the ship seem colder (lighter) than the surface of the sea.

American Astronomical Society Austin sees new infrared images

2012-01-12T14:51:00.000Z

The BBC web site has a small slide show of some far infrared images from space telescopes (such as WISE, Herschel and Spitzer) that were released at the 219th American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, which ends today (12th Jan).

More on AVOID remote ash cloud detection

2011-12-08T17:17:00.000Z

I wrote over a year ago about the AVOID passive-infrared system to remotely detect volcanic ash clouds from aircraft. The system is now being trialled by EasyJet with test flight around Mount Etna in Sicily and the BBC web site has a short film about it.

Two chances to meet Simon Marsden

2011-11-24T19:00:00.001Z

I guess you're familiar with Simon Marsden's atmospheric (if not downright spooky) infrared photographs of ruins and the like. I've recently mentioned his new book on vampires and there are two chances to get a signed copy and meet the man coming up before the New Year.

The first is at the Walcot Gate, off Walcot Street, Bath, Somerset between Tuesday 29th November and Saturday 3rd December 2011 (11am - 5pm). Like the book, the exhibition is called Vampires - The Twilight World and Simon will be on hand throughout the run to answer questions and sign copies.

A little more formal is a talk called Christmas Spirits, at Stubton Hall, near Newark, Nottinghamshire on Saturday 10th December 2011 from 6.30 pm to midnight. It says here ...

Come and listen to internationally famous photographer, author and ghost hunter Sir Simon Marsden talk about his upbringing in haunted houses that so influenced his career. Illustrated with photographic slides he goes on to describe how he created his singular style and the techniques he uses. But most of all share some of the extraordinary adventures he has experienced when travelling in the UK and in foreign lands in search of the undead, which have sometimes been truly frightening.

Here's hoping his stock of infrared film holds up.

Long-lasting near-infrared emitter

2011-11-21T17:58:00.004Z

Via various web sites I've been led to a paper published in Nature Materials [abstract].

Zhengwei Pan, associate professor of physics and engineering at the University of Georgia, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, and his team have developed a material which will fluoresce in a narrow band around 700nm when excited by any visible wavelength including fluorescent lighting. OK, we all know that 700nm is the boundary between red and near-infrared but the eye's sensitivity to that wavelength is so low that we will usually refer to this as near-infrared. You can see the excitation and emission spectra in the Nature abstract.

What is exciting about this work is that, after a short excitation, the material will continue to emit for a long time ... 'seconds to minutes' will result in more than 360 hours output according to the paper. The material can be fabricated into nano-particles which could bind to cancer cells, enabling visual location of small cancers in the body, it can be made into ceramic discs or even paint in order to provide illumination visible only to people using near-IR sensitive devices. I can see an application to detect whether something has been exposed to light recently.

Apparently the starting point is the trivalent chromium ion, a well-known IR emitter when its electrons return to their ground state after excitation by visible light. Usually the effect lasts only a few milliseconds but this new material embeds the chromium in such a way that the emitted light is trapped and releases the energy more slowly. [More info at EurekaAlert for those of us without a Nature subscription.]

This photo shows Zhengwei Pan (left) and postdoctoral researcher Feng Liu in a darkened room, using only their infrared-emitting ceramic discs as a source of illumination. The phosphorescent material was also mixed into the paint that was used to create the University of Georgia logo behind them. You can just see the 'five-o'clock-shadow' on their faces, a result of near-infrared skin penetration. [Credit: Zhengwei Pan/UGA]

Nature in a different light

2011-11-16T17:26:00.000Z

More innovative thermal imaging from Chris Lavers. His Nature in a different light exhibition is at Paignton Library and Information Centre in Devon until December 6th (not Sundays).

The exhibition combines striking thermal images of endangered species coupled with beautiful conventional photographs of the animals. It is the work of Dr Chris Lavers from Plymouth University, Jean and Ray Wiltshire (regular photographers at Paignton Zoo), and Paignton Zoo’s Dr Amy Plowman, and is funded by the Institute of Physics and the British Science Association Bristol and Bath Branch.

Swords, ploughshares and calendars

2011-10-31T12:33:00.003Z

Chris Lavers' Swords into Ploughshares Science-Art exhibition is at Topsham Library in Devon until November 7th. The blurb says

His theme looks at transfer of military technologies into civilian applications and provides interesting insights into everyday items: from microwave ovens and the Swiss Army knife to Geostationary satellites!

They should add infrared/thermal imaging of course.

If you're looking for an infrared photography calendar for 2011, since I don't produce one, then you should check out Simon Marsden's Haunted Realm and Poetry of the Dark calendars. More information on his web site www.marsdenarchive.com.

I should also mention that Simon will be giving a talk called The Twilight Hour, and promoting his latest book, at Waterstones in Canterbury next Thursday (November 3rd) at 1830. It costs £3 to see him but that is refunded if you buy the book.

Enquiries: 01227 – 456343 or manager@canterbury.waterstones.co.uk

Free Phil Trans

2011-10-26T11:33:00.000+01:00

Great news that the Royal Society has decided to make its archive freely available on line on a permanent basis. This is covered on this web page which also gives a link to the archive search page.

The main journal of interest to us is Phil Trans: the Philosophical Transactions, which started publishing in 1665. Amongst more than eight thousand documents you can find the very papers in which William Hershel described his discovery of infrared:

Investigation of the Powers of the Prismatic Colours to Heat and Illuminate Objects; With Remarks, That Prove the Different Refrangibility of Radiant Heat. To Which is Added, an Inquiry into the Method of Viewing the Sun Advantageously, with Telescopes of Large Apertures and High Magnifying Powers. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 1800 90, 255-283
Experiments on the Refrangibility of the Invisible Rays of the Sun, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 1800 90, 284-292

Herschel was prolific. There are 33 papers of his published in 1800 alone. He was the very model of a major scientific mind.

Phil Trans was freely available during 2010 as this was the Royal Society's anniversary year, and access to the papers was very helpful to me when I worked on my history of infrared photography.

Many people believe that open access to scientific papers, many of which are reporting publicly funded research, is definitely something to encourage. The Royal Society says their decision is part of its 'ongoing commitment to open access in scientific publishing' and I salute that.

Elliott Landy photos in Paris

2011-10-18T10:04:00.001+01:00

Another opportunity to see some of Elliott Landy's great photos of 60s musicians, including some stunning colour infrareds and including his Dylan shot.

It's not in a gallery; it's at the Armani shop in Saint Germain des Prés (149 Boulevard Saint-Germain) in Paris. It opens tonight (18th) and runs for a week.

Elliott writes:

Magnum and Armani have created a collection of my '60's Music photos which features some of my abstract and especially colorful imagery - a different group than I normally exhibit - less literal and more painterly. They are printed on a variety of non-paper media in large sizes and have never been printed this way before. Some of the images have never been exhibited prior to this show.

Outer planets ablaze at 1.5 microns

2011-09-27T23:35:00.001+01:00

Astronomer Mike Brown at Caltech hunts in the outer reaches of the solar system. He usually concentrates on what is called the Kuiper Belt which extends from the orbit of Neptune out to about twice as far as Neptune's orbit. He recently used the Keck telescope in Hawaii with the intention of imaging Neptune's moon Triton, but the views of the planet itself, and closer neighbour Uranus, were too interesting to ignore. The Keck's adaptive optics system, which compensates for turbulence in the earth's atmosphere, produces stunning results.

Neptune, glowing like a demonic cricket ball, shows the two distinct bands which are glowing at the imaging wavelength of 1.5 microns (1500 nm). Of course these are not really 'hot' since the surface of Neptune is -200 C and the bright bands will only be a few degrees warmer. These correspond to faint but visible features on Neptune's 'surface'.

With Uranus the main features are the rings, which stand out distinctly given the low level of radiation from the planet itself, and the spot to the top left which is the moon Miranda. The bright spots on the surface are clouds. This is notable because the 'surface' of Uranus, in visible light, is almost devoid of any features (although, as the 'northern' uranian hemisphere warms up some banding is appearing).

There is more at space.com.

RW Wood took infrared photographs of gas giants Jupiter and Saturn at the end of October 1915. He had been granted use of the 60 inch reflector at Mount Wilson and took photographs through infrared, yellow, violet and ultraviolet filters. His infrared filter had a band-pass of 700 nm, with its upper limit being determined by the plate sensitivity, which was probably less than 800 nm. In this case infrared photographs showed less features than visible light whereas belts were clearly shown on the violet and ultraviolet plates. (It is not possible to record a wavelength as long as 1.5 microns using photographic emulsion, so an electronic sensor has to be used, although this is not thermal imaging. However, this wavelength is still within an atmospheric window for infrared.)

You can read Wood's 1916 paper on the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS). It is entitled Monochromatic Photography of Jupiter and Saturn.

[My thanks to Mike Brown for permission to reproduce his images here.]

Infrared invisibility cloak

2011-09-06T13:08:00.000+01:00

RV Jones, in his excellent book on British scientific intelligence during the Second World War, called Most Secret War, tells the story of a German attempt to camouflage submarines so that they blended into the sea at both visible and far-infrared/thermal wavelengths. They developed a painting scheme which combined a black undercoat with a top layer of varnish that included powdered glass in suspension. To the naked eye the boat would look grey, presumably like the grey north Atlantic, but to an infrared viewer it would look dark, again like the sea. The properties of the undercoat, glass and varnish were such that infrared passed straight through and was absorbed by the undercoat while visible light was refracted by the glass and gave a grey appearance.

This was a neat trick, of which Jones was most complimentary in his book. Unfortunately the British were actually detecting submarines by using radar and not infrared.

This story comes to mind when seeing the news stories circulating about a thermal invisibility cloak called ADAPTIV produced by BAE systems (their press release). The plan is to enable a military object, such as a tank, to either blend into the background or to appear to be something innocuous. This is done by covering an appropriate surface or two with ingenious hexagonal panels that can be electronically set to give off suitable far-infrared radiation on demand. The trick being the ability to change temperature very rapidly and to adopt a temperature that can be lower as well as higher than ambient.

A thermal imaging camera can be used to pickup what is behind the object and use the ADAPTIV panels to show this on the opposite surface, thus rendering the object invisible. By replacing some of the output pixels with a different thermal pattern the object can be made to appear smaller and different. It's unclear whether such as system could yet be used by an individual soldier but objects larger than vehicles ... even buildings ... can be cloaked using this technology.

The promotional video is rather fun, not only because of the 'so natural that you want to go to war' music but also for the shots of ADAPTIV in action. I particularly like how the panels can be used to display advertisements!

Infrared Polaroid

2011-08-30T19:39:00.001+01:00

A box of Polaroid Land Infrared Film turned up on eBay a few months ago. I wasn't aware that such a thing existed but there it was, and the seller kindly included photographs of the packaging and the data sheet.

The film was reportedly available between 1964 and 1969 (the data sheet shown was dated May 1967) and was designated Type 413. It was a black and white film sensitive between UV and just beyond 900 nm with a peak at 830 and a trough at 510. Equivalent ASA rating was 200 with a Wratten #87 rising to 600 with a red filter and 800 with no filter.

If anyone knows of any examples taken with this film please let me know.

Simon Marsen's Vampires

2011-08-16T10:13:00.000+01:00

You are probably aware of Simon Marsden's atmospheric infrared photographs of ruins and other settings with a supernatural ambience. He uses Kodak HIE infrared film, with its characteristic grain and halation, and usually photographs with strong back-light to increase the day-for-night effect.

Simon has just circulated an email about his next book, due to be published in the UK and USA in October, entitled Vampires: The Twilight World and published by Palazzo Editions. I have to say the cover is stunning, and Whitby Abbey is one of those places of which I've always wanted to take an infrared photograph.

Signed copies will be available (signed by Simon I should add ... in case you've been watching too much Twilight) from Simon Marsden’s website from 1st October 2011: www.simonmarsden.co.uk.

Soviet infrared photography

2011-08-08T11:47:00.001+01:00

There is one gap the history of infrared photography of which I have been very conscious: the old Soviet Union. The soviets obviously had infrared film, the movie Soy Cuba made in the early 1960s made extensive use of it, and I found a NASA reference to some colour infrared film being flown on the space station.

Of course, my not reading Russian doesn't help but I have managed to track down an intriguing publication from the American military which is available to buy from the National Technical Information Service. It's a translation of a book by I B Levitin published in 1961, translated in 1967, and titled Photography by Infrared Light (approximately).

The document is described, rather oddly, as a machine translation, which has then been 'tidied up' by a human. Actually it reads quite well. The term used for the film is infrachromatic, though I don't know whether that is a literal translation: but it's a nice term.

According to the book, at that point there were three film types regularly manufactured in the USSR - Infrachrom 760, Infrachrom 840 and Infrachrom 880 - with a 720 version manufactured 'irregularly'. These were made in sheets, 35mm and 'wide film' of 19 and 33 cm width. I did a double-take over that: 33 cm is over a foot! The author notes that the number usually refers to the point of maximum sensitivity.

Agfa in East Germany also made infrared film. Eleven different types are listed, divided into khart (less sensitive more contrast) and rapid (more sensitive less contrast). [The translator notes these names are transliterated from Russian rather than being the German terms.]

The book then goes on to list foreign film types, and this list contains more types than I was aware of so I will list the manufacturers here (as shown in the document):

Eastman Kodak (USA)
Ferrania (Italy)
Gevaert (Belgium)
Guilminot (France)
Kodak (Great Britain)
Kodak-Pate (France)
Konishiroku (Japan)

Pate is presumably Pathé and Konishiroku Honten was the name for Konica until 1987 (see Wikipedia entry). So the Konica film was older than I realised, by a long way, and it seems Kodak in the UK made film separately from the USA at the time. Of course by the end of its life Kodak's HIE film was only made in Rochester.

Levitin's book is very technical and delves even deeper into the physics and chemistry than Clark. It perhaps deserves a wider distribution but for the moment, if you're interested, you can buy it from NTIS as document number AD663365. NTIS is worth a search anyway, for example it tells us that astronaut Gordon Cooper took infrared photos from orbit on May 16, 1963 during Mercury Spaceflight MA-9 (Faith 7). Of course, now I know about this, a Google search yields several results, explaining that his infrared shots were for meteorological purposes. What I don't know is whether these were the first infrared photographs from space ... I'll have to find out.

Clouds

2011-08-01T16:22:00.003+01:00

Lake Pemichangan

It's clouds' illusions I recall ... says the song. Since infrared photography is perfect for delineating clouds against a black sky I thought this slideshow on the BBC web site would provide a useful guide. So next time you will know what those clouds are called. It's a pity there are no infrared shots ... so I've included one of my own here.

Kenji Hirasawa's Celebrity: more thermal art

2011-07-09T16:18:00.002+01:00

I've mentioned thermal imaging exhibitions by Joseph Giacomin and Chris Lavers in the past. During July there is an exhibition of thermography by Kenji Hirasawa at the KK Outlet in Hoxton Square, London, called Celebrity. He's used a thermal camera to look at people in Madame Tussaud's, the wax models being almost invisible to the termal eye so that the 'hot' people seem to be interacting with empty space.

You can see more via the KK web site and there will be a book as well. There are other thermographs on Hirasawa's web site and I am particularly taken by some portraits. I have to say that I am becoming bored with the standard orange-red palette being used with pretty-well all the thermographs I'm seeing but since thermal images are always monochromatic (they show the temperature for each pixel), there isn't another 'dimension' to provide a mechanism for more varied colouration.

Celebrity runs every day except Sunday until July 30th.

In the meantime, Thermal by Joseph Giacomin is available through Amazon.

Infrared can switch off your camera

2011-06-20T17:09:00.004+01:00

You probably know that all digital sensors are sensitive to near-infrared and that most cameras block out infrared to avoid contaminating the colours. I found that my iPhone camera is indeed sensitive to IR and could clearly see the infrared emitters from a headphone loop system at a conference I recently attended.

I had wondered many years ago whether flooding a cinema screen with infrared could hamper anyone wanting to film the movie from the screen. Back in the days of poor filtering this may well have worked but I suspect filtering would remove the infrared with modern cameras.

Apple have applied for a patent for a mechanism that carries a code in an infrared signal 'broadcast' at a venue, decoding it in the phone (or other device) and using the result to determine whether the camera should be deactivated. This is a similar idea to the coding that prevents scanners and photocopiers from copying banknotes. The BBC carried a story reporting that rapper Tinie Tempah was against this idea because he likes his fans to video his concerts (a bit like the Grateful Dead for those of us a little older ... the Dead used to set aside an area in front of the stage for fans who wanted to record their concerts). Apple's system would be optional: it would be up the venue/performer to use it to disable cameras.

Some of the artists interviewed by the BBC had a simple view. They didn't mind being videoed but they thought their fans should actually be enjoying the concert instead.

Of course Apple could configure the iPhones to receive those headphone loops (usually helpful to people with impaired hearing). That would be nice: you could use your own headphones.

Infrared: the eleventh dimension

2011-06-17T17:11:00.000+01:00

A slightly whimsical post this time.

I've been thinking about the multi-dimensional nature of photography and how choosing the wavelengths in which to shoot is part of a photographer's wider set of choices when taking a photograph: the dimensions.

We have ...

the three dimensions of space for our position
the three dimensions of orientation for our direction of shooting (pitch, roll and yaw)
the dimension of perspective and framing (choice of focal length)
the dimension of time (when we press the shutter)
the dimension of duration (how long is the exposure)
the dimension of focus (and depth of field)
the dimension of spectrum (what wavelengths we record)

By that reckoning choosing to look at the world in infrared is part of the eleventh dimension of photography. If that works then there is an eerie similarity with part of string theory which postulates that space-time has eleven dimensions, of which we only experience three.

CEK Mees biography

2011-06-10T09:00:00.004+01:00

Browsing through Google Books I came across a good biography of CEK Mees, written by Walter Clark, from New Scientist, published in 1979. We forget that, as part of his long and distinguished career at Kodak, Clark set up Kodak's Harrow labs in 1928 and stayed there as director of research until 1931.

This is the link to the article.

The Science and Art of Thermal Imagery

2011-06-07T18:51:00.001+01:00

I've mentioned Chris Lavers' thermal images before. His next exhibition is at Teignmouth Community College (in Teignbridge, Devon) and is called The Science and Art of Thermal Imagery.

It runs from 1200 on Thursday June 16th until 1100 on Tuesday July 5th and this is how Chris describes it:

This exhibition provides an introduction to the topic of thermal imagery, with particular focus on the science that can be provided by wildlife thermography, and the aesthetic art of both natural and man-made objects, including iconic art. This exhibition is based on the 2008 and 2010 Institute of Physics sponsored Nature in a Different Light exhibitions.

Richard Mosse and Aerochrome

2011-05-30T17:06:00.004+01:00

I was away for a couple of days so it was only today (Monday) when I opened the Guardian newspaper Saturday magazine to find some interesting colour infrared photographs taken in the Congo by Richard Mosse. It's a (probably) unique application of infrared photography to reportage. He was unaware of it but he was taking these photographs almost exactly a century after the first infrared photograph was published early last year.

The best place to explore the photographs is his web site (natch) where you follow links either to the project itself (called Infra) or to the text/press page.

He's interested in the aesthetic of the false-colour images, having seen it on a Grateful Dead album cover (and elsewhere ... more on IR rock photos here). The idea is to make us take a second look at things when using this film. It's very difficult to get good results with the film for a whole bunch of reasons, and I am impressed technically with what Mosse has achieved. Partly this is because he worked in medium format, using stock cut down from the 70mm Aerochrome rolls, which provides a sharpness the 35mm Ektachrome rarely achieved.

The stock, KODAK AEROCHROME III Infrared Film 1443, is now discontinued, which would make it the last mainstream infrared film. Apart from some obscure Soviet Russian film, Kodak seem to have been the only company to experiment with infrared and colour-shifting. In case you are unaware, Infrared Ektachrome and Aerochrome (essentially the same film) have three sensitive layers, one each for near infrared, red and green although all layers are sensitive to blue which must be filtered out. A yellow (minus-blue) filter was the 'correct' filter to use with this but may people also used orange and other filters to play with the resulting palette of colours. The dyes in the film were coupled in such a way that infrared in the original scene was rendered as red, red as green and green as blue.

It was originally produced as camouflage detection film. The first incarnation appeared in 1942 in the form of 'Aero Kodacolor Reversal Film, Camouflage Detection'. The idea of combining infrared and panchromatic emulsions with colour processing (to produce a false colour result) had originated in Kodak's laboratory in the UK in 1941. The plan was to have two layers which were sensitive each side of 700 nm, where the Wood effect kicked in. Early tests of the new film, used in conjunction with conventional colour film, were positive although the film was considered to be too slow. By 1945, a faster version of the film had been standardised and was recommended for operational use in the Pacific at the close of the second world war.

Eventually, the film became widely used to remotely detect the health of foliage, even from space. Since healthy foliage reflects a lot of near infrared (due to the Wood Effect) the relative amounts of green and infrared that a plant reflects are an indicator of its health. With this infrared film the colour shifts from magenta to red as the foliage gets healthier. Camouflage detection is a subset of this since green paint and dead leaves could easily be distinguished from the real thing. That's until the 'enemy' started making special infrared camouflage paint.

So one thing that strikes me about Richard Mosse's photos from Congo are how magenta the landscape is: stressed as the botanists would say. Healthy foliage would be bright red but there is little of this to be seen, although there is some.

According to an interview in the BJP, which is reprinted in the text/press page of Mosse's web site, he's going to experiment with infrared movies, shot with a Red One without its infrared blocking filter. This can be easily done, as I discussed this very process with Red at IBC about four years ago. There may be issues with any colour-splitting filters in the light path (splitting RG and B to the three sensors) since the dyes in the filters will have their own variable amounts of infrared response. Richard says that "It will be a kind of blown-out monochrome palette", apparently expecting it to look like a night scope. I would expect it to look more like the usual output of a DSLR with an infrared filter in front of it but those pesky colour-splitting filters are a bit of a wild card. I did an experiment with Ikegami for last years' IBC and while the monochrome infrared output was poor (because of the splitter filters) we did get a good result using a minus-blue filter. I've written about this approach before, when I went to the BBC Natural History Unit and we tried a minus-blue filter on a modified DSLR to emulate infrared Ektachrome.

So it may be that, with a bit of suitable channel mixing, Richard Mosse's infrared movies will continue the look of his aerochrome stills. I hope we'll see the results.

RW Wood at the Royal Institution

2011-05-18T16:29:00.002+01:00

On May 19th 1911, Professor RW Wood presented one of the Royal Institution's legendary Friday night discourses with the title Recent Experiments with Invisible Light. This built upon the paper he had presented the previous September to the Royal Photographic Society and took place almost at the end of his 1910-11 sabbatical in Europe.

The discourses, which continue to this day, are formal affairs, as Wood reported to his biographer ...

His Grace, the Duke of Northumberland, not being available at the time, Gertrude [Mrs Wood] entered the hall on the arm of the Right Honorable Earl Cathcart, Vice-President, followed by my daughter Margaret, on the arm of the diminutive Sir William Crookes, who came nearly up to her shoulder and whose long white mustache, waxed at the ends into two sharp spikes, fascinated her. I brought up the rear. There was a brief introduction and at last I was standing behind the famous lecture table, giving my talk...

The following Friday, Wood was still in London and attended the discourse given by Marconi who was proposing to demonstrate reception of a radio transmission live across the Atlantic from Nova Scotia (a feat many still thought impossible) using an aerial flown using kites and, as Wood reported, "such a display of impressive modern electrical appliances as one seldom sees outside a World's Fair." Marconi's presentation, according to Wood, was rather monotonous. He read from a manuscript with his elbow on the desk and his head in his hand. "He appeared to be the least interested person in the auditorium ... and there were no experiments." Marconi droned on and his assistants became more and more agitated. The wind was dropping and while the morse signal from Canada was audible it would not be for long.

Despite Wood's encouragement the assistants would not dare to interrupt Marconi. So finally, when he eventually announced "We shall now listen to the signals coming across the Atlantic" the assistants could only shake their heads: the wind had dropped, the kites were down, the signal was lost.

A little tangential to infrared imaging I know, but it's salutary to remember just how much has changed in 100 years.

[With thanks to Doctor Wood: Modern Wizard of the Laboratory (1941) by William Seabrook]

Tristán and Michaud

2011-04-19T18:03:00.003+01:00

In a letter to the Times, dated June 4th 1932, CEK Mees referred to long-distance infrared photographs of mountains, taken in Costa Rica in 1915 or 16 by Gustave Michaud and J Fidel Tristán of Costa Rica State College, which were published in Scientific American. I've been trying to track down more information about them, and it seems they were pioneers in both infrared and ultraviolet photography.

Unfortunately I have been unable to find the Scientific American article to which Mees refers. Scanning through the bound volumes for 1915 and 1916 in the British Library did not reveal them. However I did find a few relevant items there and on the web.

They wrote an article on Flowers photographed by invisible light in the October 10th 1914 edition of Scientific American. Most of this demonstrated how many white flowers came out 'black' when photographed under ultraviolet light, or showed some patterning that was not apparent in ordinary light. They did comment on how flowers looked in infrared but as they usually showed up as 'white' they didn't find this as interesting.

I have photographed flowers, even dark ones, in infrared. This is an example. It is actually a dark red rose, illuminated by a flash gun.

An unusual reference to their work appears online in a 1918 edition of a magazine called Rays from the True Cross (see page 209) in an article called Insects that see 'Invisible' Light, which tells us that in an edition of Scientific American dated Jan 15 they were again investigating the appearance of flowers, which

led us recently to photograph, in ultra-violet and infra-red lights, a number of butterflies

This article was not in any Scientific American in 1915 but the date may well refer to January 15th, possibly in 1918 ... but I have not had a chance to track that down as yet.

A further piece of research was published in Archives des sciences, March 1915 into absorption of UV and IR by arable soil and included both kinds of photographs.

It is remarkable that only a few years after Wood demonstrated that the world could look different in infrared (and UV) that these two researchers used photography to investigate aspects of this in detail. I would like to find out more about these two. Anyone know anything more?

[FYI: A useful resource of Scientific American for this period can be found at www.scientificamericanpast.com.]

Olaf Bloch's 1930s lectures

2011-04-13T19:24:00.002+01:00

In the early 1930s Olaf Bloch was the president of the RPS. He was also chief chemist of Ilford's laboratory, and I was already aware of a paper he presented early in 1933 to the Royal Society of Arts called Recent Developments in Infra-red Photography. During that presentation he took an infrared photograph of the audience which was projected later. The RSA journal does not include the photograph.

I recently got hold of a copy of the RPS Photographic Journal for August 1932, knowing it included an article on infrared. I had hoped that, given the date, it would give me some more information on the infrared plates that became available during 1932 from Kodak and Ilford. That wasn't the case. Instead the RPS paper was an earlier appearance of Bloch's presentation, actually given in April 1932 and hence a little early for my historic purpose.

However, despite this lecture being given unexpectedly because the planned showing of various new pieces of equipment wasn't possible, Bloch performed his 'party piece' with an infrared photograph of the audience. This is it.

I don't think this was taken in complete darkness but I would expect the normal room illumination was low and lamps with infrared filters were set up for the purpose. The published paper also included a long-distance infrared photo of the Isle of Arran that was published in the Times on May 30th 1932.

Is there or is there not an infrared Olympus Pen?

2011-04-10T18:27:00.001+01:00

Further to my note about a infrared version of the Olympus EP1 being seen at a show, we have tried to get some further information from Olympus about this and, sadly, we got nowhere. This probably means that yes, there is one ... but there is only one and it's not a product.

You can guess my feelings about manufacturers missing a trick with the potential market for well-configured infrared cameras.

Further back on the Wood Effect

2011-04-07T16:38:00.002+01:00

In a post in December last year I wrote about the Wood Effect, which causes foliage to look white in infrared photographs. I had traced the term back to a reference to an article in a journal called Photofreund published in Germany in 1938, which I had not seen.

Now, with help from a friend in Germany, I have been able to read the article. (Bearing in mind I don't speak German so this was achieved with some assistance.)

The paper is called Warum erscheint gruner Pflanzenwuchs bei Infrarot-Aufnamed weiss? This translates as Why do green plants appear white on infrared-photography? and one paragraph (translated) reads

In that kind of pictures it is extremely disturbing when all plants appear in an unnatural bright tone, as if covered with white frost or snow. Where does this so-called "Wood-effect" (1910) come from?

This doesn't actually resolve my search, since Dr Marmet, the author, refers to the Wood Effekt as bezeichnete, literally designated according to my dictionary. This implies that the term was already in use and Dr Marmet had heard it elsewhere, but whether in a German or an English language publication is unclear. He includes the 1910 date as well but doesn't say to what he refers: this could be the RPS Journal or Century Magazine. Remember that Mecke and Baldwin, writing in 1937, were calling it the Chlorophylleffekt.

The difficulty with online searches for wood effect is that you keep coming back to timber! But I shall keep digging.

Infrared 100 Exhibition photographs online

2011-03-28T18:53:00.001+01:00

For those of you who were unable to get to Bath for the Infrared 100 exhibition last October, the RPS have put some of the images online on their web site.

Go to www.rps.org/fenton-house/Infrared-100 and you can browse through some of the historic and contemporary photographs we included. These include a couple of RW Wood's photos from 1910 and 1911, Abe Frajndlich's Rosebud as Demeter, Carol Highsmith's Streetcar on St Charles and Teresa Airey's Magical Banyans. Professor Francis Ring's 1959 thermal image of an arthritic knee, made with a prototype scanner using a searchlight mirror and bicycle chains, and Professor Robert Greenler's 1971 photograph of the infrared component of a rainbow are also included.

A selection of images are also featured in the current RPS Journal.

Thermal Street View from MIT

2011-03-17T19:32:00.002Z

The aim may be to provide a rapid energy audit of buildings but MIT have a thermal imaging system that is interesting for purely visual reasons.

The full story is in this news piece on their web site, complete with video.

Here's what caught my eye ...

The new process begins by photographing buildings with a system the team developed to get high-resolution, long wave infrared images using an inexpensive, low-resolution camera. Normally, the cost of high-resolution far-infrared cameras is prohibitive for such widespread use — such cameras can cost $40,000 each. As a substitute, the team developed a novel patent-pending technology called “Kinetic Super Resolution” that uses a computer to combine many different images taken with an inexpensive low-resolution IR camera (costing less than $1,000), that produces a high-resolution mosaic image.

Note that in this context 'high resolution' would be 640 by 480 pixels resolution for $40K. In this case the MIT system's Kinetic Super Resolution improves image resolution by using moving (presumably this means scanning) images. I would imagine that this is trading temporal resolution for spatial resolution by looking at how successive pixels differ when these pixels are displaced by less than pixel/image resolution. A patent is pending.

DNS tidy-up

2011-03-02T12:21:00.001Z

I have, at last, sorted out the domain name for this blog so it runs properly off www.infrared100.org ... although infrared100.blogspot.com still works. Apologies if you got a seemingly spurious landing page while I sorted out the routing.

Evaporography - home brew thermal imaging

2011-02-22T17:20:00.006Z

There are a few indirect methods for imaging far-infrared radiation, relying on a visible effect caused by the infrared which can then be seen or photographed. One of these is known as evaporography.

Dr Marianus Czerny from the University of Frankfurt, writing in Zeitschrift fur Physik in 1929 (this is a big file of translated papers ... go to page 1), proposed coating a celluloid membrane with a thin layer of white napthalene and putting this in an enclosure saturated with napthalene vapour. Any areas of the coating that heated up due to infrared radiation falling on it would evaporate (sublime) and it would be possible to photograph the membrane to 'fix' a record of the patterns produced. This became known as an evaporograph.

This technique was largely unknown to the public until May 1956, when a newly-declassified device called Eva was demonstrated by Baird Associates of Cambridge Mass. The images were unmistakably thermal images and, in this case, were formed on a thin sheet of plastic coated with silicon oil. This was held in a small vacuum chamber with a salt window through which the infrared passed. The thickness of the oil film varied with the amount of radiation falling on it and interference effects resulted in this being shown as different colours with a resolution of one degree (presumably Fahrenheit). Baird's evaporographs (or sometimes evapographs) appeared in several magazines, including Time, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and Life.

Although Baird's applications, at least as promoted, were of thermal imaging, the evaporograph principle can be applied to shorter wavelengths. Pol F Swings, who wrote a paper in 1945 on astronomical applications of evaporography, compared this to near infrared photography using Agfa 1050 plates (without ammonia hypersensitisation) and concluded that at wavelengths shorter than 1200 nm the Agfa was faster where as at wavelengths longer than 1300 the evaporograph was faster.

The process is relatively easy to reproduce, probably well within the range of a school laboratory, and a recipe currently available on the internet (scan down the page), but dating from 1972, claims to be able to record the heat from a human body after dark in ten seconds.

Infrared London at the Strand Gallery

2011-02-08T17:14:00.002Z

A quick mention for an exhibition of photographs by Quentin Bell, which is running at the Strand Gallery (32 John Adam Street, London WC2N 6BP) from February 15th to 26th. It's a retrospective called A Line in the Sand and includes some infrared images from a project shot around Greater London.

Bell was commissioned by the owners of the May Fair Hotel in London to produce 105 images of London for their guest floors. You can see these on his web site. It's a nice collection, including some of my old haunts out west. The infrared artefacts are subtle: the images rely more on the textures of the film than infrared effects but you do see the occasional Wood effect creeping in.

I don't know how many of the shots will be in the exhibition, but you can always go and stay at the May Fair and see them all!

Is DARPA the future of thermal imaging?

2011-01-29T18:44:00.004Z

Last week DARPA ... you know ... the people who invented the internet ... published a 'funding opportunity' called Broad Agency Announcement: Low Cost Thermal Imager Manufacturing

It's got this snappy URL for access to the PDF:

www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=b332544b1b6c59a8f94eed3413e842c0

Basically they want manufacturers to come up with thermal imaging devices that can be used by 'warfighters' in much the same way most of them now use image intensifiers. They want it small, such as to work in or with a smart phone or PDA, low cost, evolutionary rather than evolutionary (no chance for the micro-yagi imager idea then) and to work in the 8-12 micron band. This was described to me by a contact at NASA as the place 'where bodies glow best'.

There's a good analysis of this story in the Register but even more interesting is the idea that this kind of thermal imager could be combined in a broad-spectrum augmented reality display which, eventually, we all could wear. These could be glasses or even contact lenses and could allow us, or an intelligent system working on our behalf, to show us a range of views of the world ranging from the visible we already see, through image intensifiers and near-infrared to thermal. Great for hill-walking or even driving at night.

If DARPA achieve their goal (which isn't certain of course) then this could be coming to a headset near you within a few years ... because DARPA want this to cost less that $500, be lighter than 25 grams and say "If successful, the IR cell phone camera-like approach will lead to widespread proliferation in military and consumer products."

I can't wait.

Olympus Infrared EP1 seen at PDN PhotoPlus

2011-01-09T16:38:00.002Z

This is a story that needs more research. The Phoblogger saw a specially-modified version of the Olympus EP1 at PDN PhotoPlus Expo 2010 in November. It is apparently being modified by another company but would appear to have Olympus's blessing.

This is a 'Pen' camera with 12 megapixel resolution. It has live view and since the same sensor is used for imaging, focussing and exposure, it should work well for IR.

Charles Edward Kenneth Mees 1882-1960

2010-12-30T18:04:00.004Z

As 2010 draws to a close it is fitting I should commemorate another key player in the history of infrared photography, who died 50 years ago: CEK (Kenneth) Mees.

Mees had a doctorate in photographic theory from the University of London and was joint managing director of Wratten and Wainwright, who had produced the first commercial panchromatic photographic plates in 1906.

Mees had joined the Croydon-based firm in 1906. The father and son team of Frederick Charles Luther Wratten and Sidney Herbert Wratten brought him in as co-owner and joint managing director when they incorporated the company on the elder Wratten's retirement (before that it was a partnership with Henry Wainwright). When George Eastman set up the Kodak research laboratory in Rochester in 1912 he brought Mees over from England to run it. In order to do so be bought the Wratten and Wainwright business. RW Wood wrote to Mees on hearing the news, hoping he had "held 'em up for a king's ransom", asking whether Kodak were going to "close up every plate factory in the world" and hoping that Kodak would now turn out "uniform plates for scientific work". Mees wrote back to reassure Wood, saying that "we shall be able to make even better plates for scientific research than we can make at Croydon".

It is possible that Wood and Mees were acquainted by letter before Wood's European sabbatical in 1910-11, but they clearly became friends and corresponded until at least the early 1950s. In 1910 Mees was an ordinary member of the council of the Royal Photographic Society, and he chaired the Traill-Taylor lecture meeting where Wood presented his Invisible Rays paper. Wood's contact address was listed as c/o Wratten and Wainwright in the RPS exhibition catalogue and it would have been Mees who provided Wood with the infrared-sensitive plates he used on his Italian travels in 1911.

Mees also made use of infrared-sensitive plates himself. The Kodak Research Laboratory archive at the University of Rochester contains thirteen photographs (negatives and prints) taken in Portugal in 1910 by Mees using Wratten and Wainwright infrared sensitised plates (one of which was included in the Infrared 100 Exhibition). The images were taken through a Wratten 88 red filter with five-minute exposures and some show the characteristic dark skies and bright foliage that we now recognise in infrared photographs. However, in his 1936 book 'Photography' Mees credits Wood with taking the "earliest photographs of landscapes by infra-red rays", presumably referring to the images from Wood's 1910 publications.

I won't go into further biographical details on Mees as I can point you to two good sources. One is from the Croydon Camera Club, of which he was a member (explore the Who is Dr Mees item in the menu), and the other is the Image, the bulletin of George Eastman House.

Finally, and nothing whatsoever to do with infrared photography, George Eastman House archives hold a 1922 note from Wood to Mees, affording a written introduction to one Leopold Mannes ...

who has worked out a system of color-photography which appears to me to have some novel features which I think will interest you and perhaps interest your company. It occurred to me that you might offer him the facilities of your laboratory for a few days ... The process is quite simple, and the results which I have seen look promising.[Ref]

Mees did indeed provide facilities to Mannes and his colleague Leopold Godowsky Jr to work on their colour process, which eventually became known as Kodachrome. This iconic slide film was discontinued last year and the last-remaining development facility closes its doors today, at the end of 2010. So it goes.

Antennas or imaging array?

2010-12-28T18:58:00.003Z

Via last week's New Scientist magazine I came across an interesting announcement from Idaho National Laboratory, which is part of the US Department of Energy. Researchers there, at Microcontinuum in Cambridge (Mass) and Patrick Pinhero of the University of Missouri have been working on an alternative way of gathering solar energy using minute antennas rather than solar cells.

They have produced an array of what they call nanoantennas which are tuned to infrared radiation and, as antennas do, resonate and pass the energy into electrical circuits. So far they have a six-inch circular 'stamp' that can emboss a plastic substrate which can then be coated with metal. The six-inch stamp can produce an array of ten million antennas. So far they are only able to produce arrays small enough to match infrared wavelengths but they plan to go finer and so reach visible wavelengths. One problem is how to handle the energy from the resonating antennas, since this is at light-like frequencies (a few hundred teraHerz) and rather beyond your average radio set!

Why is this of interest to us? Let's follow this through logically and refer to that six-inch stamp as a ten megapixel array and you see what I'm thinking. Could a tuned array of nanoantennas be an alternative way of making an image sensor? Ironically it is easier to make such an array for far infrared wavelengths than for visible light; so this might be a way of producing an inexpensive thermal imaging sensor. The down side is that (I assume) the energy arrays collect energy in serial or parallel and don't give access to individual 'pixel' antennas. For thermal wavelengths there is also the problem of ambient radiation: this is something they wish to capture for a solar array but it would contaminate an image. However, hopefully the former is a question of nano-engineering and the latter is already a problem with some existing kinds of thermal camera so we know how to address it (by cooling the sensor).

Using antennas for imaging has some advantages. To filter wavelengths you simply adjust the size of the antenna to match whichever wavelength you wish to receive. It might even be possible to do this dynamically. The antennas may be inherently polarised as well, which would have interesting applications. They might even be more efficient in harvesting the light energy since the researchers estimate the efficiency as being close to 80% and perhaps you could even make miniature Yagis for more gain. And the cost? "As cheap as inexpensive carpet" says the report. The INL report is actually from 2008 although New Scientist reported some more recent developments.

For over 150 years we have relied on energetic photons changing chemical or electronic structures for our imaging: the idea of tuning in to the energy directly is an interesting alternative. Perhaps the biggest barrier to use as an imaging sensor is scale. Don't forget that ten megapixel array was six inches across. It'd be ironic if a large format view camera was needed to use it.

[Later: It was pointed out to me that the plural of antenna is antennas if it's radio and antennae if it's insects. YLSED!]

Snow and the Wood Effect

2010-12-18T15:57:00.001Z

As snow falls here in southern England for the second time this December I thought it appropriate to say a little about the Wood Effect. Named after Prof RW Wood, this is the brightening of foliage seen in infrared photographs that can often look like snow, first seen in his photographs from 1910.

The phenomenon had been observed before Wood, but not in an image, by Ogden Nicholas Rood, professor of physics at Columbia University, in his book on colour published in 1890 (or earlier). However this was based on spectrographic measurement of 'green' leaves and not photographic observation.

Willstatter and Stoll produced their theory of leaf reflectance in 1918 in their book Untersuchunger aber die Assimilation der Kohlenseture published in Berlin, and much of the literature on this was published in Germany. Not much is freely available on the web, although Mecke and Baldwin wrote about leaf reflectance in infrared in a 1937 paper which is available as a PDF (from Die Natlirwissenschaften in German).

Basically, the W-S theory says that light is reflected around within the internal structure of a leaf. Some eventually passes through and some is reflected back. Near infrared is not attenuated by the chlorophylls in the leaf as they are transparent at these wavelengths. The physical structure of the leaf is similar to that of snow, which is why infrared photographs can often look like snowy scenes. Unhealthy or dead leaves do not reflect so much because of changes in the internal structure, so the amount of infrared reflected by foliage can be used as an indicator of plant health.

Allen, and Richardson (Applied Optics Vol 12 #10 1973 behind paywall) explored the Willstatter-Stoll theory using ray tracing. This was a cumbersome process with 1970s computers and they were unable to do much, but they concluded that the theory predicted more transmission of light through the leaves than ray-tracing predicted. They concluded ...

The W-S model can be easily improved, however, by introduction of more intercellular air spaces. The modified W-S model promises to be an excellent representation of physical reality. Accurate predictions, however, require an inordinate amount of computer time.

Jacquemoud and Ustin, from Paris and California respectively, looked at modelling the optical properties of leaves in a paper from 2008 that is available online. They refer to a near-infrared plateau between 700 and 1100nm. Here ...

biochemical absorptions are limited to the compounds typically found in dry leaves, primarily cellulose, lignin and other structural carbohydrates. However, foliar reflection in this region is also affected by multiple scattering of photons within the leaf, related to the internal structure, fraction of air spaces, and air-water interfaces that refract light within leaves.

They don't call this the Wood Effect because, like most of the earlier papers I mention, they consider the optical properties across more wavelengths than infrared. However Mecke and Baldwin refer to the brightening of foliage in infrared as the Chlorophylleffekt.

So where is the earliest reference to this as the Wood Effect?

Strangely, this also seems to be in a German publication, in an article by someone named Marmet in a journal called Photofreund, (reference 18: 289-90, No. 15, August, 1938). I have seen this cited in a literature list produced by Kodak at the time, but not the original article itself.

The hunt continues.

Infrared photography declining in popularity?

2010-12-15T13:14:00.000Z

Google's Web Trends is an interesting facility. It tracks the traffic for search terms and can give you an indication of something's popularity.

Here's the result for Infrared Photography. Nothing of any use before 2007 but a slight decline since the end of 2006. But why the spikes in interest in October 2007 and January 2010? The spike in January was just before Phil Coomes ran a story about the centenary on the BBC web site. You'll notice that there's most interest in the far east: Philippines, Singapore and Indonesia as top three regions. USA is 6th and the UK is 10th below Australia, NZ and Canada. I'm not sure what all this really means but it's curious nonetheless.

The graph of news items shows a dramatic peak around August 2008. Again ... why might that be?

The Google graph is showing a slow declining trend. Is that because less people are interested in infrared photography or could it be that those people who used to ask how to do it now know and don't need to look it up any more. Or maybe it means nothing. Oh, and while you're at it, try 'Lady Gaga' as a search term.

Elliott Landy photos in Montreal and Echirolles

2010-12-08T11:22:00.001Z

Elliott Landy is the man who took that iconic colour infrared shot of Bob Dylan and was the official photographer at the Woodstock festival. Those of you who made it to the Infrared 100 exhibition in Bath will have seen a large print of his bobness, perched on the boot of a car and surrounded by bright red foliage.

This photo, and others ... including more of Elliott's 60s infrared photography ... will be on show in Montreal until Christmas Eve. The exhibition is called Elliott Landy, Spirit of a Generation and it's at Galerie Lounge TD in the Maison du Festival Rio Tinto Alcan, 305 Sainte Catherine Street West. Entrance is free.

More in this story from the Montreal Gazette and at Galerie Lounge. This second includes a video interview (in English).

Also, the Center for Graphics in Echirolles, near Grenoble in France has an exhibition of Elliott's 60s photos. This runs until January 30th. This also includes infrareds and there is more info en français on the Graphisme Echirolles web site.

Centenary year almost up

2010-12-05T20:16:00.000Z

I've been counting 1910 as the year in which infrared photography started, triggered by RW Wood's articles published in the Century Magazine and Photographic Journal. So we are approaching the end of 2010 as a centenary year ... but is that the end of this blog?

Obviously I'm going to say "No! It's not."

Partly this is because May 2011 is the centenary of a paper Wood presented at the Royal Institution on his invisible rays work and the end of his European sabbatical, but also this is a good place for infrared photography snippets and pointers. So, let's carry on shall we? Your contributions, questions and comments will all be gratefully received.

Here's to Infrared 101 and beyond.

RPS Good Picture 2010: Hot Topics in Imaging

2010-11-22T12:30:00.000Z

December 4th draws near and it's worth another mention of this year's RPS Good Picture event which takes place that day. As the event web page says:

Over the years we have endeavoured to showcase the technical diversity of digital imaging. As 2010 is the 100th anniversary of Infrared photography, we have taken the opportunity to celebrate this by including some IR topics that should be of great interest to all

I know it's a bit invidious to single out individual presentations but there are two that I am particularly looking forward to:

John Smith: Infrared in the Surveillance Society
Dr Alan Hodgson ASIS FRPS: Practical Options For Infrared Photography

John is very knowledgeable on forensics and as that's a field I know almost nothing about (beyond watching CSI) it will be good to fill in the substantial gaps. Alan has been exploring various ways of making infrared images with what he describes as old kit: a kind of junkyard challenge for imaging scientists. Should be fun.

The day costs £64 (£36 concessions) including lunch and networking. It runs from 10 until 4 on Saturday December 4th at the University of Westminster, Regent Street, London. This is what us old timers still call Regent Street Poly and the meeting will take place in what is apparently one of the oldest, if not the oldest, cinemas in the country.

Think Photography

2010-11-12T10:12:00.000Z

The RPS Think Photography event takes place over this weekend in West Bromwich. There are a couple of small infrared contributions to this: five photographs from the Infrared 100 Exhibition will be on show and Clive Haynes is presenting on Saturday.

Clive is talking on Digital Infrared Image Capture and Workflow at 2pm on Saturday. He takes great digital infrared photographs and will be well worth seeing.

More info on the RPS web site.

Thermal

2010-11-08T13:57:00.001Z

I've mentioned Joseph Giacomin's artistic thermal images before, and one of his shots was included in the Infrared 100 exhibition recently. Now he has published a book of thermograms called Thermal: Seeing the World Through 21st Century Eyes. The text muses on perception, while the yellow-red images illustrate an alternative way at looking at - perceiving - the world around us.

Available from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and elsewhere.

Portfolio TWO now published

2010-10-28T17:42:00.000+01:00

Copies of the RPS Portfolio TWO book are now appearing. In a magnificent collection of RPS member images and articles are three Infrared 100 items: my history of infrared photography, a similar article on thermal imaging by Francis Ring, and infrared photos from the RPS Digital Imaging Group. More info, and online ordering, on the RPS web site.

RW Wood 1910 paper now online

2010-10-25T15:17:00.000+01:00

The paper from the October 1910 Photographic Journal, that started this whole centenary thing off, is now available in facsimile online. It was scanned from a bound set of 1910 Phot J's that used to be in Kodak's archive but is now in the care of de Montford University. This book, as shown above, is currently residing in the cabinet at Fenton House, as part of the Infrared 100 Exhibition, which closes on Thursday.

The RPS have linked the paper from this news page or from this direct link (PDF). Archival accessibility preparation by the ATSF palaeontology team ... ie me.

48 hour exposures

2010-10-21T11:23:00.003+01:00

An image from the Hubble deep-field telescope has revealed the most distant, and therefore oldest, object ever discovered. It is a galaxy known as UDFy-38135539. A small one, but a galaxy nonetheless and the light from it has taken over 13 billion years to reach us; starting its journey only 600 millions years after the big bang. It is also receding so quickly that its light is red-shifted by a factor of 8.6, such that any visible light is shifted down to the deep infrared. You can see the starfield image on the ESO web site. The story on the BBC web site reveals that this was a 48 hour exposure and the ESO web site tells us that the teams responsible were NASA, ESA, G Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and University of California, Santa Cruz) and the HUDF09 Team.

Lick Observatory has historically played a significant part in our infrared imaging story. During the 1920s and 30s scientists at the observatory experimented with infrared photography, as I mentioned in an earlier post. The infrared comparison photos that WH Wright took of Mars in 1924, which proved that Mars has an atmosphere to speak of, were taken there (and are included in the Infrared 100 exhibition at the RPS in Bath this month). If you're interested there is a 2006 paper on the Lick photographs in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage (Vol 9, No 2, p 181-184) but it's not available online.

And the 48 hours? There's a delicious coincidence which brings me to another historic infrared photograph taken at another famous American observatory, Mount Wilson. In this case the date is 1930, the photographer is HD Babcock and it is a blurry and unassuming image of some objects on a shelf. It is also the first photograph taken in total darkness.

Infrared photograph taken in total darkness by HD Babcock in 1930

I had a telephone conversation with an archivist at Mount Wilson but, so far, we have been unable to find out whether a real copy of this photo still exists. The one you see here is taken from an old edition of Clark, who says that the 'light' source was one or more under-run electric heaters. The plate was sensitised with neocyanine and the exposure was 48 hours at f/2.

So here we have the darker recesses of the universe, one distant and one very close. Both unobservable except using infrared imaging and both taking 48 hours to shoot.

Artistic thermal images on show in London

2010-10-18T19:17:00.003+01:00

Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern by Joseph Giacomin

Professor Joseph Giacomin works at the Human Centred Design Institute at Brunel University. His 'day job' covers things like the design of cars but he has a sideline in fascinating artistic thermal images. Unusually, he is able to get his hands on one of these very expensive cameras and has the artistic eye to use it creatively. There is one of his images in the Infrared 100 exhibition at the RPS in Bath this month.

You can also get the opportunity to see some of his thermograms of the Millennium Bridge as part of an exhibition called Bridge Stories, which runs from this Friday, October 22nd, until January 21st at Arup Phase 2 in Fitzroy St, London. [More info]

Exhibition opening group photo

2010-10-15T10:19:00.002+01:00

Left to right: Professor Francis Ring, Councillor Sarah Bevan, Derek Birch, Rosemary Wilman (RPS President), Andy Finney
Photo by Sally Smart

The bolometer

2010-10-14T16:28:00.002+01:00

The thermal people often refer to bolometers. These basically are remote thermometers, and usually work by focussing heat radiation onto something which changes its characteristics, in a measurable way, when it warms up. The original version used a platinum foil strip blackened with soot from a candle. Its electrical resistance changed with temperature. The inventor was Samuel Pierpont Langley, in 1878.

This gave rise to the following rhyme/limerick which was quoted several times during the Infrared 100 events last week.

Oh Langley devised the bolometer
Which is really a kind of thermometer
Which can measure the heat
From a polar bear's feet
At a distance of half a kilometre

Who said science can't be fun! Sadly, it seems Langley actually measured the temperature of a cow from a quarter of a mile ... but that doesn't rhyme [Ref]. There are variations and I believe the original rhyme is by Mr Anon.

Infrared 100 Exhibition and Symposium

2010-10-11T19:11:00.005+01:00

Last week was a busy one. We had the private view/launch of the Infrared 100 exhibition at the RPS in Bath on Monday and the two-day symposium on Thursday and Friday. [See the earlier blog entry]

A corner of the exhibition at Fenton House

A number of our photographers were able to join us for the launch and Rosemary Wilman, President of the Royal Photographic Society was host. Councillor Sarah Bevan, who is the chair of Bath and North East Somerset Council (known locally as BNES) also gave a short speech, and proved very knowledgeable on the subject too. So, as they say, a splendid time was had by all.

The two-day symposium in London was also well-supported and I discovered such things as just how much has been done in infrared astronomy in recent years, not to mention the fascinating way african elephants control their body temperature in an unforgiving climate. My great thanks to Francis Ring and Helen Walker who each organised one of the two days and especially to the hospitality of the Royal Astronomical Society who hosted day one and jointly-branded day two which was in the Geological Society ... both in Burlington House. One guest on both days was Professor Paul Feldman from RW Wood's own establishment, Johns Hopkins University, and it was really great to meet him.

I am now starting discussions that I hope will lead to an exciting event next May in central London which will be open to all. Fingers crossed.

Cover of the RPS Journal

2010-10-03T23:36:00.002+01:00

Fishing on the River Avon at Christchurch by Andy Finney

I remember it was Dr Hook who sang about being on the cover of Rolling Stone: they even got there. Well, I'm delighted to say that I finally made the cover of the RPS Journal Infrared Centenary Edition. It's a faux-colour image taken in Christchurch in Hampshire last year. The colours have a little to do with real life but also to do with infrared leaking through the Beyer filtering on the sensor of my Sony DSC-F828 camera. The edition also includes Clive Haynes discussing infrared digital photography and a piece on the background to Professor Wood's 1910 and 1911 infrared photographs, by me.

Infrared 100 Exhibition

2010-10-01T12:40:00.003+01:00

The Infrared 100 exhibition has opened at the RPS Fenton House Gallery in Bath (a short but uphill walk along Wells Road from the centre of town: MAP).

The exhibition runs until Thursday 28th October, 0930 to 1630 Monday to Friday: info on RPS web site.

Moydrum Castle by Simon Marsden 1978

These are the images included (in title order) ...

Aerial photograph at 23,000 feet, showing Mount Shasta at a distance of 331 miles Captain Albert W Stevens, US Army Air Corp 1932
African Elephant Thermogram Professor James Mercer
Approaching Storm, Cape Cod Joseph Paduano, 1984
Baby Stars in the Rosette Molecular Cloud Herschel Space Observatory 2010
Bob Dylan,Woodstock Elliott Landy 1968
Children watching Mickey Mouse cartoon James Jarché for the Daily Herald 1934
Cottage in the Woods Martin Addison FRPS
Dover and the French coast Bill Warhurst for the Times May 9th 1932
Foreboding Mel Gigg FRPS
Group photograph taken in total darkness at Kodak Research lab, October 7th 1931
How Caple: the Gateway Malcolm Haynes
Infrared rainbow with secondary and supernumeries Professor Robert Greenler 1971
Kingsley Pond Keith Millar
Lantern slide comparing views of Mars and San José William Hammond Wright, Lick Observatory 1924
Lochan na h’Achlaise Peter Clark FRPS
Magical Banyans Theresa Airey
Minneapolis Dream Diane Syme 1996
Mojave Desert Nude Chris Maher
Moydrum Castle Simon Marsden 1978
New Orleans Streetcar on St Charles Carol M Highsmith
Park in Portugal CEK (Kenneth) Mees 1910
Puff the Magic Dragon Mike Finley
Resolution Clive Haynes FRPS
Rosebud as Demeter Abe Frajndlich 1975
Shephali at the Taj Mahal Martin Reeves 1990
Sunflower Andy Finney
The Final Bow Colin Trow-Poole ARPS
Thermal Dancer ProfessorJoseph Giacomin
Thermogram showing rheumatoid athritis in the knee Professor Francis Ring 1959
Tortworth Alan Lewis LRPS
Tree with Exposed Roots Tim Rudman FRPS
Untitled Akron Ohio Stephen Paternite 1980

You can also see Karl Ferris's fish-eye colour infrared photo of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, on the cover of their first album as released in the USA. Professor Wood's 1910 Photographic Journal article will also be on display, as is the double-page spread from the Illustrated London News of June 1911.

I'll be very interested in your comments if you visit the exhibition. Photos without dates are the contemporary set and all date from this millennium. My huge thanks to Simon Marsden for allowing us to use his photograph to help promote the event. Simon's web sites are: www.simonmarsden.co.uk and www.marsdenarchive.com. I would also like to acknowledge the help of ILFORD Lab Direct, who superbly printed our black and white archival images.

It was 100 years ago today ...

2010-09-27T10:28:00.000+01:00

...that Professor Robert Williams Wood gave his landmark lecture Photography by Invisible Rays to the Royal Photographic Society at its HQ in Russell Square, London. As the RPS members meeting card shows, this was at 8pm.

To put this in context, it was only four years since Wratten and Wainwright had started production of the first panchromatic photographic plates available in the shops. Before this photographers wanting to photograph anything red had to sensitise their own plates. Ironically, the new panchromatic photography had its detractors who said that this was not real photography at all; that the world as seen through the lens should only record ultraviolet and blue. Into this photographic world Wood introduced the often surreal and potentially very useful features of infrared imaging.

At this time it seems that only Wood (starting in 1908) and CEK (Kenneth) Mees of Wratten and Wainwright and the Croydon Camera Club (who took some of his own plates to Portugal in 1910) had ever photographed infrared landscapes. Now Google images returns ten million hits on the word infrared and over a million on infrared photograph. Wood's landscapes are where it all started, over a century ago.

Only one photo left ...

2010-09-23T19:17:00.000+01:00

Elliott Landy's amazing infrared portrait of Bob Dylan arrived this morning which means I am now only one image short of the set for the Infrared 100 exhibition. Ilford have done an amazing job printing up the historic images we got from archives both here and in the USA and the photographers I contacted have been extremely helpful in supplying prints and, in many cases, matting them to fit the RPS frames. Even the RPS president has joined in the fun by cutting loads of mattes and even solved the problem of how to frame a century-old edition of the Illustrated London News.

I'll post a list of the images in a day or so but any of you within striking distance of Bath should make an effort to come along to Fenton House. Details in the later post.

Infrared 100 Symposium: Day 2

2010-09-19T15:48:00.003+01:00

The second day of the symposium at Burlington House (which also houses the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, London) on October 8th is dedicated to infrared astronomy and organised by the Royal Astronomical Society. Chairs for the day are Helen Walker and Peter Clegg.

The UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey
Steve Warren, Imperial College London
Cosmology in the infrared
Michael Rowan-Robinson, Imperial College London
Multi-wavelength far infrared imaging: HERSCHEL today and SPICA tomorrow
Matt Griffin, Cardiff
SWIRE: FIR Luminosity function and the SFR of galaxies at 0 < z < 1.5
Harsit Patel, Imperial College London
AKARI observations of the Galactic Plane
Mireya Etxaluze, Harvard Smithsonian CfA
The impact of HERSCHEL on studies of star formation
Derek Ward-Thompson, Cardiff
Near-infrared performance of the wide-field survey telescope VISTA
Jim Emerson, QMUL
Direct imaging of extra solar planets in the infrared
Anne-Marie Lagrange, Grenoble
Exploring the Universe with WISE
Ned Wright, UCLA
Infrared Imaging with JWST
Gillian Wright, UKATC

A booking form is available on the RPS-ISG web site and there is a discount for attending both days.

Infrared 100 Symposium: Day 1

2010-09-18T18:06:00.001+01:00

Here is the programme for the first day of the two-day Infrared 100 Symposium at Burlington House, Piccadilly London on October 7th. I'll add the second day program (which is on astronomical infrared) tomorrow. The event will be opened by the President of the Royal Photographic Society, Rosemary Wilman Hon FRPS.

Keynote Lecture: RW Wood at Johns Hopkins - A Panchromatic Legacy
Prof Paul Feldman, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
A Century of Infrared Photography
Andy Finney
Infrared Thermal Imaging of the Human Body: from Analogue to Digital
Prof Francis Ring
High-Performance Thermal Imagery from 1st and 2nd Generation Cameras
Prof CT Elliott, FRS
Your Tiny Hand is Frozen
Prof Kurt Ammer, Vienna
Thermal Behaviour of the African Elephant
Prof James Mercer, University of North Norway
Sleep Deprivation and Frustration - Filming Wildlife for Television using Infrared
Colin Jackson, BBC Natural History Unit Bristol
IR surveys of Buildings, the Energy Conservation Story
John Snell, Vermont, USA
Satellite and Terrestrial Thermal Imaging to Monitor Volcanoes
Talfan Barnie, Cambridge, UK
Visualising the Earth with Infrared (in a multispectral context)
Dr G Awcock, Brighton University

A booking form can be found on the RPS Imaging Science Group web site.

More from Chris Lavers

2010-09-17T11:04:00.001+01:00

I have already mentioned Dr Chris Lavers' talk Swords to ploughshares but Chris tells me the date has been brought forwards to Tuesday November 9th at 8pm. The venue is the @Bristol Centre Science Café.

His fascinating exhibition of thermal images of animals and even insects is also making more appearances:

Bristol Science Centre October 11 - November 9
Institute of Physics, London November 24
Flavel Arts Centre, Dartmouth January 3-17 2011

More school exhibitions are planned for 2011.

Infrared 100 at IBC 2010

2010-09-10T14:00:00.001+01:00

Just a quick reminder in case you are heading for the IBC exhibition or conference at the RAI in Amsterdam. There will be a session on Monday 13th September at 1400 called Broadcasting with Invisible Light which will look at how infrared imaging has impinged on television and the movies in the past 100 years. Speakers are Iain Logie Baird talking about his grandfather's work on infrared TV in the 1920s and 30s, Professor Rod Thomas explaining and demonstrating thermal imaging, Colin Jackson from the BBC Natural History Unit showing how they do programmes like Big Cat Live with infrared technology ... and me with a few explanations about how it all fits together and showing a couple of extracts from movies that used infrared.

[Later] Fascinating session for a select audience and I am now learning a lot more about Baird's Noctovision. Thanks to all who came along.

Infrared 100 Exhibition

2010-09-09T14:04:00.002+01:00

There will be a small but select exhibition of infrared images at the Royal Photographic Society HQ in Bath running from Friday October 1st to Friday October 28th.

The images on show will represent historic and contemporary work with a mixture of scientific and artistic images. Photographs include the work of photographers including renowned artists Abe Frajndlich, Elliott Landy and Simon Marsden, as well as Society members including Tim Rudman, Clive Haynes and Alan Lewis. The opening hours are 9.30am – 4.30pm, Monday to Friday; admission is free.

The address is Fenton House, 122 Wells Road. Bath. BA2 3AH

New linked web site: Dome from Malaysia

2010-09-06T22:38:00.000+01:00

We have a new infrared photographic web site joined to the project. The enigmatically named Digital Dome, from Malaysia, and his exotically coloured views from, what is to me, the other side of the world.

His URL is www.infrared2u.com

Soy Cuba ... Soy Infrarrojo

2010-08-27T18:52:00.000+01:00

In the early 1960s there was a curious collaboration between the Cuban and Russian film industries resulting in an extraordinary movie called Soy Cuba (I am Cuba). The director was Mikhail Kalatozov, famous most probably for The Cranes Are Flying in 1957, and the director of photography was Sergey Urusevsky. The film is a cinematic tour de force, featuring several long single-take sequences which almost defy attempts to work out just how they were done.

This motion picture interests us at Infrared 100 because much of it was shot using infrared film, with characteristic bright foliage and dark skies. The background to this was explained by members of the crew in a Brazilian documentary about the making of Soy Cuba, and called the Siberian Mammoth, a reference to the film being lost and overlooked for many years.

Raúl Rodríguez, Assistant cameraman ...

Urusevsky wanted the film images to be a synthesis of Cuba. Each individual frame should shine like a sugar crystal, transforming the green of palm trees and sugarcane into tones of silver. To capture the Caribbean light he used an infrared negative which at that time was restricted solely to the use of the Soviet army.

Alexander "Sacha" Calzatti, Camera operator ...

It took me several months to go from Moscow to the city where the film negative was made. It was made in a factory that produced military material. It was made in the same factory that produced the negatives for filming the other side of the moon. The infrared film creates a very strong visual effect which is difficult to control. The trick here is that the negative is panchromatic. Some chemicals are added to make it more sensitive to infrared light.

While the pace of the film can be slow at times, there is no doubting its power. If cinematic gems appeal to you I recommend you check it out as the DVD is available, although you need to get the deluxe edition to see the documentary as well.

More background is in the Wikipedia entry and some extracts and a trailer are available on YouTube. I have to admit that Soviet infrared film is a bit of a blank for me. Apart from a colour infrared film tested by NASA, I have not seen any references to actual types. It would be fascinating to see the negatives of this movie and find out just what this stock was called.

I will be discussing the movie and showing a brief extract at the Broadcasting with InvisibleLight session at IBC/Amsterdam on September 13th.

Fluorescent lamp + IR filter =?

2010-08-19T10:43:00.002+01:00

A quick diversion from infrared photography to Infrared Luminescence (aka fluorescence). This can be used to reveal faded writing on old and damaged documents, and for other forensic things. I recently discovered a somewhat elderly but fascinating article by the legendary Andrew Davidhazy (of Rochester Institute of Technology in the States) explaining a do-it-yourself approach to this. Usually you need an expensive infrared-blocking filter over the broad-spectrum/white light source and an infrared-pass filter over the lens. Also usually, if you try and take an infrared photo under fluorescent lights you get almost nothing but noise.

Andrew points out in this paper that the average fluorescent light bulb (which presumably includes a lot of those low energy bulbs now prevalent) has a strange spectrum, attuned to our vision, which includes (virtually) no infrared. So if you illuminate your document with this and have an infrared-pass filter over your camera lens, all that will get through is infrared resulting from fluorescence in the document. The light, which includes no infrared, causes some of the document to fluoresce at a longer wavelength and some of that gets through the infrared filter.

Something to try I think.

Is this the oldest IR landscape?

2010-08-13T14:50:00.003+01:00

I have always been sceptical that the infrared photographs included in Professor Wood's 1910 RPS paper (presented on Tuesday September 27th 1910 and included in the Photographic Journal for October) were the oldest such images published. Now, following a trail suggested by Johns Hopkins University I read an early 1910 paper by Wood on The Moon in Ultraviolet (Popular Astronomy February 1910) in which he refers to his infrared landscape photographs as being of "little scientific value" and says he will explain more in a forthcoming article in the Century Magazine.

There are many editions of Century online and the February 1910 one does indeed contain an illustrated article by Wood called A New Departure in Photography. It includes two infrared landscape photos, of which this is one:

Professor Wood's summer home at East Hampton

These were taken the previous summer (1909) and might be the infrared landscapes referred to in Wood's biography. [Later: no they're not; those were in 1908 and were shots of mountains] If you'd like to read the full article you can find it here in the Hathi Trust digital library. Go to page 565 and read on.

Swords to ploughshares

2010-08-09T10:16:00.001+01:00

I've already mentioned Dr Chris Lavers' work on thermal imaging in this blog as he has had an exhibition of images in Bristol recently.

Another date for your infrared diary is November ~~24th~~ 9th 2010, when Chris will be giving a talk Swords to ploughshares: civilian applications for military technologies? at the @Bristol Centre Science Cafe. To quote the event promotional email ...

Whereas in the United States, technologies developed for the military pass into civilian application unless there is a reason why they shouldn't, this transfer of benefits is less observed in the UK's military.

Dr. Chris Lavers, Subject Matter Expert (Radar and Telecommunications) Lecturer, from the University of Plymouth joins us to talk alongside his exhibition illustrating humanitarian and wildlife applications of infra red technologies and share conversations over the wider issues surrounding military technologies.

Minus blue and back focus

2010-07-31T18:18:00.003+01:00

In preparation for the session at IBC in September I have been doing some experimentation.

Firstly, with the assistance of friends at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol, I got my hands on a full-frame Canon DSLR which had had its infrared blocking filter removed. Unfortunately the weather denied me the sunshine that really gives a punch to the Wood Effect but the Clifton Suspension Bridge is always impressive.

One thing I was keen to try was using a minus-blue filter (Wratten #12) to emulate Infrared Ektachrome. Despite the cloudy day the result was promising.

Colour infrared Clifton Suspension Bridge

You can see the first stab here. After some channel equalisation/normalisation this image uses the Photoshop channel mixer to map the camera's blue channel to red (only infrared should be getting through the #12 and the camera's blue filter), maps red to green and green to blue. Some blue (an arbitrary 50%) has been subtracted from both the green and blue output channels. This emulates the process used in Kodak's DCS 420, a version of which was a short-lived colour infrared DSLR from the mid-1990s. It looks as if this deserves further study. If you have a modified DSLR and a #12 filter you should give it a try.

My second point concerns back focus. One problem that you hit when you remove the infrared blocking filter from a digital camera is that unless you replace it with some other glass the lens will no longer focus. I was discussing this with engineers at Ikegami (while we explored modifying a broadcast HD camera for infrared work) and they explained why this happens. It was one of those Homer Simpson 'Doh!' moments. (Forgive me if you already know this.)

What I had forgotten is that the filtration in front of the sensor is actually part of the light path that focuses the lens. The light going through the filter is not parallel, it is converging to hit the sensor. So if you remove the filter (glass) you change the refractive index of that part of the light path and optically extend the lens. To shorten it again you either have to physically move the lens (difficult because you probably don't have much room between the back element and the sensor, even if you could move it) or you have to put back some glass with the same refractive properties as the filter you removed.

You have probably removed more than one filter, bonded together. The camera we were looking at had a removable filter unit which contained a high-pass filter in the frequency domain (the infrared blocker) and a low-pass filter in the spatial domain (the anti-alias filter). Fortunately, for landscape work, aliasing is not too big a problem and some DSLR owners actually remove these to get more sharpness. The actual efficacy of this is a subject hotly debated on various web forums and I won't get into it here.

Hot air at Farnborough

2010-07-21T14:26:00.006+01:00

Two air display videos for you: both a mixture of colour and thermal imaging courtesy of Flightglobal and FLIR Systems.

First ... some display highlights. Note the thermal reflections on the Airbus fuselage and how the thermal imaging shows the hot exhaust gases clearly.

Secondly, the American F-22 Raptor ultrafighter. This was briefly at Farnborough in 2008 but is at this year's show every day including the public days over the coming weekend. More info in this piece in the Register, but it's worth noting that this plane aims to be thermally stealthy by reducing its heat signature. It does this, apparently, by channeling heat into the fuel tanks. This isn't so much to avoid detection by people with thermal cameras but more to foil heat-seeking missile systems.

Thermal stealth dates back to (at least) the second World War, with the German navy concocting a special paint for U-Boats to reduce their infrared visibility (apparently under the misconception that the British were using IR to detect subs whereas it was actually RADAR).

It's interesting to see how this particular FLIR camera (Star SAFIRE HD) switches from colour to thermal. This is a multispectral unit including HD thermal imaging. Here's the data sheet.

Infrared 100 at NECC Conference

2010-07-06T16:45:00.001+01:00

The 2010 New England Camera Club Conference is taking place at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst from July 16th to 18th. One of the sessions, presented by William Barnett, is called Beyond Human Vision and looks at techniques for producing black and white and coloured infrared photos. Bill is using the centenary as the starting point for his talk.

The conference web page includes a programme and information on how to get to the university. You have to dig into the registration form to find out the cost and who to call to check availability.

Hyperspectral universe

2010-07-05T12:36:00.001+01:00

I just discovered a fascinating web site called Chromoscope, which blends results from a number of astronomical projects working at wavelengths right across the EM spectrum. Basically you move a slider and change the wavelength at which you are 'seeing' the universe. They added microwave data from the Planck space telescope today.

Near infrared is 'represented' by Hydrogen-alpha data at about 656 nm (deep red really) and there is far infrared data from IRAS. The spectra are not continuous so as you move the slider you blend distinct data sets rather than moving continuously across wavelengths.

Kudos to the University of Cardiff for supporting this open source data-visualisation project, which makes use of the Google Maps API for zooming and panning.

[I plan to list current infrared astronomy projects here, once I've completed some research.]

Thomas Jefferson changes his mind

2010-07-04T15:00:00.003+01:00

News emerged over the past few days about hyperspectral imaging being used to confirm that Thomas Jefferson changed a key word in the US Declaration of Independence as he drafted it. It has been suspected for over 60 years that he originally referred to fellow subjects (of George III) but hastily over-wrote it to become fellow citizens. This is in a sentence detailing grievances against King George, although the sentence itself didn't reach the final draft.

A Library of Congress researcher used hyperspectral imaging (imaging the document various times using different narrow bands of light and nearby radiation such as infrared) to investigate Jefferson's rough draft late last year. It is unclear why the news came out now, but it was just before Independence Day weekend. See this web page at the LOC which includes a link to multi-spectral image of the Declaration.

I mention this because one of the things Professor Wood noted in his 1910 paper was the use of different bands of light (in his case specifically infrared, visible and ultraviolet) to investigate documents. Infrared especially has a long history of use for investigating both dubious documents (the euphemism for forgeries and tampering) but also helping archaeologists and art conservationists. As early as 1933 the British Museum was using infrared film to help read and decipher writing on millennia-old Egyptian documents and NASA are even now using infrared hyperspectral imaging to garner more from the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

Forward Thinking Infrared

2010-07-01T11:04:00.001+01:00

Web site The Forward Thinking Museum has just launched its latest exhibit, Infrared: Photography in a Different Light. It not only includes some fine infrared photographs but also takes a look at examples of infrared cinematography, an often overlooked field. Some of the examples make use of infrared film to simulate night shots in the daytime, a technique called day for night (or nuit américaine as Truffaut fans will know). The exhibit also looks at some examples of infrared film used purely for its look ... notably what seems to be an extraordinary Cuban film from the early 1960s called Soy Cuba about which I will now find out more.

Thanks also to the museum for supporting Infrared 100, so they become the latest Infrared 100 Event.

Thermal @Bristol

2010-06-14T10:27:00.002+01:00

There is an exhibition of thermal wildlife images running in the @Bristol café until July 7th. According the the press release ...

This exhibition builds upon a previous thermal imaging collaboration between Paignton Zoo, Plymouth University, the Butterfly and Otter Sanctuary at Buckfastleigh Devon, and two keen excellent local photographers, Ray and Jean Wiltshire, which has been viewed by over 80,000 people across the South West of England so far.

It has been put together by Dr Chris Lavers, Head of Sensors and Telecommunications at Plymouth University (although he's based in Devonport).

I am particularly taken by some fascinating shots showing 'blood' flow in butterfly wings. (It's not actually blood ... it's hemolymph fluid.) If you're in the south-west of England you'll know @Bristol but otherwise, here's the web site.

That reminds me of the nature of colour in butterfly wings. It's not pigment: most of the colours are caused by diffraction patterns due to the minute scales on the wings.

[Later that same day] Web page for the exhibition

Most famous infrared photograph

2010-06-11T12:26:00.002+01:00

What is the most widely seen infrared photograph? It may be Anton Corbijn's cover for the U2 album The Unforgettable Fire. It may be one of the images released from the Herschel space observatory. It may be Minor White's Cobblestone House.

What do you think? What was the first infrared photograph you remember seeing ... the first one that stuck in your memory. Let me know by comment or by email (link to the right).

RPS Infrared Centenary Events

2010-06-07T16:01:00.001+01:00

As hinted before, the Royal Photographic Society is celebrating the centenary of infrared imaging with a number of events. Programmes for two of them are now released and, rather than repeat the information, I will link to the RPS Imaging Science Group pages here.

Infrared 100

Two-day symposium jointly with the Royal Astronomical Society.
October 7th and 8th, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London
More information here

Good Picture 2010: Hot Topics in Imaging

Good Picture is an annual event and this year's is mostly (but not exclusively) on aspects of infrared.
December 4th, University of Westminster, Regent Street, London
More information here

Remote IR detection of volcanic ash hits headlines

2010-06-04T11:25:00.000+01:00

Easyjet have announced that they are trialling a system to detect volcanic ash from their aircraft. Most of the coverage I've seen refers to this as radar but it is an infrared system not centimetric and it is also passive not active.

AVOID (Airborne Volcanic Object Identifier and Detector) has been developed by a Norwegian academic spin-off called Nicarnica led by Anglo-Australian climate scientist Dr Fred Prata. It is presumably a specialised development of their CyClops Infrared Imaging Camera which uses an uncooled bolometer (a type of radiant energy detector invented in 1878) to detect heat radiation in five separate but adjustable wavelengths. The company say that their camera can identify volcanic ash particles and sulphur dioxide gas (a common part of volcanic eruptions) at a distance that is presumably only limited by line-of-sight.

This isn't strictly an imaging system (it does not show recognisable objects) but it does produce an image analogous to radar, showing cloud boundaries mapped against distance. Using spectroscopic analysis CyClops can differentiate between ordinary water/ice clouds and more hazardous types. AVOID will presumably offer similar facilities to allow pilots to navigate around hazardous clouds even if they are invisible to the naked eye.

Dr Prata (together with Ian Barton) produced what looks like their first patent in the field (Detection system for use in an aircraft United States Patent 5602543) in 1991 where the abstract says that the "system is able to detect the presence of volcanic ash cloud ahead of the aircraft". So this is something of which Dr Prata and his team have long experience. Incidentally, the associated advance detection of clear air turbulence from aircraft using infrared goes back even further, to at least the 1960s.

To go back even further, we find bolometers used on ships back towards the start of the 20th Century to try to detect icebergs; at a time when the Titanic was a recent memory.

BBC Sky at Night on Herschel images

2010-06-02T17:37:00.002+01:00

Next Sunday's edition (June 6) of the Sky at Night is an infrared special, looking at images of star formation from the Herschel space observatory. The BBC web site describes it thus:

The many star-forming areas of our galaxy are obscured by interstellar dust, but Herschel, a new space telescope, can see these areas in infrared light. Sir Patrick Moore is joined by Professor Derek Ward-Thompson and Dr Chris North to examine the latest stunning images from Herschel.

I phoned Patrick last week to appraise him of the centenary - he knew of Prof Wood of course - and I hope he will be able to mention Infrared 100 on the programme. Whatever happens it will be worth a view. Transmission is on BBC One on the 6th and on BBC Four on the 8th and 9th ... and it'll be on the iPlayer.

Pilot IR/Thermal imaging scheme in Scotland

2010-05-26T11:03:00.003+01:00

The single thing most people get confused about, as far as infrared is concerned, is the difference between near infrared photography and far infrared thermal imaging. This is especially apparent from the occasional emails I get, and forum postings I see, asking how to use infrared photography to study heat-loss from a building.

So I was interested to read on the BBC web site about a pilot project in Scotland, involving ten thousand homes, to use thermal imaging to 'scan' their external heat pattern and pinpoint areas where heat is being lost from the building. It's a 15 month pilot being carried out by IRT Surveys of Dundee and rather than aiming to help individual home owners the scheme wants to provide an overview of how effective various methods of insulation are.

It strikes me that one cause of the confusion is terminology. We call everything from 700 nm (just beyond red) down to the edge of microwaves by the term infrared, even though the sources of the radiation and the ways we can render it visible change significantly as we move from the photographic infrared to the thermal infrared. I found this terminological inexactitude particularly confusing while going through wartime papers to research my paper on the history of infrared photography for the RPS. One of the best sources of information on this is RV Jones, who was a senior scientist in British scientific intelligence: senior enough to have regular contact with Churchill. Jones's papers are in Churchill College in Cambridge and he also wrote a fascinating book called Most Secret War, which is still in print. Like many others, Jones refers to both ends of the infrared spectrum as simply infra-red. I had to read between the lines to try to see whether he was referring to thermal or near infrared technology ... and possibly got it wrong sometimes.

Jones told a nice story about a meeting sometime after the war with the American military where they began to tell him about a new missile they had started work on called the Sidewinder. 'So this is a heat-seeking missile then?' says Jones, somewhat startling the Americans who immediately think that their security is compromised. Jones explains that the sidewinder rattlesnake detects prey using rudimentary thermal sensors in its head, so he has surmised that this missile does likewise. Sighs of relief from the military, who have named the missile after the rattlesnake because of its striking prowess and are unaware that it uses infrared. So it goes.

Stefan Birghan and Jörg Weindl : ir2

2010-05-22T19:26:00.001+01:00

Another addition to our web associates, this time from Germany. Stefan and Jörg have some infrared images taken in Germany (at Chiemsee, a freshwater lake in Bavaria) and in Ireland and Vienna.

Their web site is www.ir-2.de and on Stefan's own web site he explains (in German) how he got interested in infrared photography after seeing a calendar by Simon Marsden on an office wall.

Herschel first anniversary

2010-05-18T10:45:00.000+01:00

It's a year since the Herschel infrared space telescope was launched and it is now sending back some extraordinary images of the cooler cosmos. No doubt these are immensely valuable to the astronomers who recognise all the ramifications of this new window on the universe but the rest of us can still just enjoy the view. There is an enthralling A/V slide show on the BBC web site.

Simon Marsden

2010-05-15T19:25:00.004+01:00

You have probably seen Simon Marsden's infrared photographs of Irish ruins or other ghostly-looking buildings and artefacts, often with striking and distinctive backlighting. You may even have a copy of one or more of his books of photos, such as In Ruins or The Haunted Realm. Simon is one of the most significant infrared specialists at work today. He uses Kodak HIE 35mm film, from a carefully refrigerated supply, and has a special love for the printing process. I plan to include one of his images in the history of infrared photography I have researched for the RPS and in the centenary exhibition.

Simon has told his email list about Infrared 100, so a warm welcome to you if you found this blog as a result. The other piece of news is that Christies is auctioning one of his prints next Friday in South Kensington. It's a specialist sale of photographs with works by Cartier-Bresson, Brandt, Fenton and even Andy Warhol (a photo of Mick Jagger biting someone's hand) in the items. Simon's is lot #111, a 2009 image Beech Hedge, Levens Hall and has an estimate of £700 to £1000.

A print of Ansel Adams' Moonrise, Hernandez, Northern New Mexico is lot #71. This is the one where he worked out the exposure by calculating the luminosity of the moon as he did not have a light meter with him. More pocket money needed though as its estimate is £20-30 thousand.

Simon Marsden's web site is the Marsden Archive.

BBC NHU @ Infrared 100 @ IBC

2010-05-14T15:45:00.000+01:00

The BBC Natural History Unit have agreed to join in our infrared session in Amsterdam at the IBC conference in September. This will be a 'virtual' appearance because our guest, producer Colin Jackson, will be on the plains of Africa at the time, shooting more footage of lions including thermal and near-infrared.

The session, Broadcasting with Invisible Light, is in the afternoon on Monday September 13th at the RAI. It will be open to anyone attending either the IBC conference or the exhibition, and there is no charge to attend the latter if you book your ticket early. ibc.org is the web site.

October Symposium

2010-05-12T14:43:00.001+01:00

The programmes for both days of the October Infrared 100 Symposium are almost completed and I'll be posting information here soon. The first day is organised by Professor Francis Ring of (amongst other things) the Royal Photographic Society Imaging Science Group and the Herschel Society ... and the second day is organised by Dr Helen Walker of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

Logie Baird to appear at IBC

2010-05-04T13:07:00.000+01:00

Iain, that is.

As I put together the session on Infrared in Broadcasting for the September IBC event in Amsterdam, Iain is my first confirmed speaker. As you may know he is curator of television at the National Media Museum in Bradford (UK) but what you may not know is that his grandfather, the legendary John Logie Baird, developed infrared television in the 1920s. He even managed to produce images in total darkness using infrared over three years before Babcock at Mount Wilson Observatory achieved the same thing on film.

Baird's system was called Noctovision, and there is more about it on my web site.

From invisible rays to the surveillance society

2010-04-09T18:55:00.001+01:00

Just a reminder that John Smith of the University of Westminster will be giving an infrared centenary lecture at the Fingerprint Society annual conference tomorrow (Saturday 10th April).

The session is called From invisible rays to the surveillance society: a centenary of infrared photography and is from 12 to 1pm. Info on the whole event, which started today, is on the Fingerprint Society web site.

John is an extremely knowledgeable infrared practitioner in the forensic field and if you are going to the conference you should go along to his lecture.

Infrared 100 at IBC 2010

2010-04-01T11:04:00.000+01:00

The prestigious IBC conference will be taking a look at infrared in broadcast and electronic media this September 13th. The planned session will be available free to anyone who attends the enormous IBC exhibition at the RAI in Amsterdam as well as those people attending the IBC conference ... and the session is being produced by yours truly. I'll let you know more as I firm up the speakers but the plan is for some fascinating demos including, with luck, a couple of ground-breaking applications. If you'd like to find out more about IBC then you should go to the IBC web site.

Welcome Jarek Majcher

2010-03-31T20:22:00.001+01:00

Jarek Majcher is an infrared photographer from Poland and a member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF). His online gallery joins our growing list but you can also see his infrared images from April 8 at the ANEKS art gallery in Opole, Poland. Jarek's URL is www.fotografia61.com ... this link is to the English version but the site is multi-lingual.

Infrared word cloud so far

2010-03-25T10:55:00.004Z

Using Wordle's great online tool for generating word clouds, here is the current overview of this blog. The more the word appears the bigger it is.

1910-1930 ... filling the gap

2010-03-19T17:47:00.004Z

You may recall I was concerned to have a big hole between Wood's infrared photos published in the Illustrated London News (ILN) in June 1911 and the first infrared photo published in the Times in March 1932. As my research continues I am plugging that gap.

A few key items:

Kenneth Mees, then at Wratten and Wainwright, took some infrared landscapes in Portugal, also in 1910 (when Wood took his first published infrared images). Mees acknowledges Wood's images from 1910 as earlier and I have not, as yet, seen the Mees photos but they are in the Kodak archive at the University of Rochester in New York state. Unlike the Wood images we have, which come to us only as printed versions in the Photographic Journal and ILN, Mees's images still exist as both negatives and large prints. Very exciting! (Mees was taken to America by Eastman and founded Kodak research. In the UK he was an active member of the Croydon Camera Club, which is still going strong.)
We know the military on both sides of the Atlantic were investigating infrared for long distance photography during the first world war. Now I have tracked down an image from almost that period. The Kodak archive includes an aerial infrared image from 1919 taken (probably) by the Fairchild Corporation.
Chappell, Wright and the two Shanes were exploring infrared photography at Lick Observatory in the 1920s. These included panoramic views of the Sierras and Yosemite Valley taken from over 100 miles away. Wright was interested in comparing terrestrial photos in both IR and UV in order to apply the same kinds of clarity (or lack of it) to photographs of Mars (at its 1924 conjunction) so that he could work out the possible consistency of the martian atmosphere.

The most fascinating piece of information concerns a photograph of a plaster figurine (bust) illuminated only by the near-infrared from two flat-irons. This image was taken at the Kodak labs and is included in the first two editions of Clark's book (and in the Kodak archive). It turns out that the image is a fake! The photographer admitted, much later, that he grew tired of waiting for the exposure to work and helped the process along with a blow-torch. That bust now becomes almost as apochryphal as Abney's kettle.

I have to report that the people at Rochester (both the University and George Eastman House) and at Lick Observatory have been amazingly helpful as I pursue this trans-Atlantic quest remotely. What did researchers do before the internet?

Candid Creativity ...

2010-03-14T16:36:00.001Z

... is the gallery of Ingrid Abraham from London and she has joined our list of associated galleries: www.candidcreativity.com

[Later] Check out her superb fish-eye shot of Canary Wharf.

It's not only rock 'n' roll ...

2010-03-12T16:34:00.004Z

... but infrared as well.

There seems to be an implicit association between rock music and infrared, especially colour infrared. I have been meaning to mention three photographers with whom I have recently communicated over the centenary because they have connections with infrared and album covers for my kind of music. Here is an invitation for you to check out their web sites.

Elliott Landy

I knew Elliott for the cover photo of Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline album (which is not IR) but he has kindly sent me his superb colour infrared photo of Dylan for the RPS historic piece I am writing. He has some more colour infrared portraits on his site, including John Lee Hooker and Ornette Coleman, plus a whole host of 60s reportage and rock photos in glorious mono. His latest book is Woodstock Vision. Check out Landyvision.

Andee Nathanson

I had a fascinating conversation with Andee last week; a break-neck sprint through her memories of photographing Venice with Lord Snowden and of her 1960s colour infrared photography. The most famous of her images is the cover of Frank Zappa's Hot Rats album; a famously freaky shot of Miss Christine of the GTOs. There are more photos of the GTOs and other rock personalities, some in infrared, on Andee's web site.

Karl Ferris

While some may think of colour infrared as being psychedelic, one photographer in our little set openly labels his work as such. Karl Ferris Psychedelic Experience includes colour IR shots he took for album covers by Jimi Hendrix (the US version of Are You Experienced shot at Kew Gardens using a fish-eye lens) and Donovan (various versions of Gift from a Flower to a Garden) plus some stunningly weird infrared fashion shots. There is a Canadian documentary video about Karl and his photography on the site as well.

Another gallery

2010-03-12T12:53:00.001Z

I received an email from Norbert Boeren from the Netherlands. His web site is added to our small but growing online gallery list. Norbert also has a current exhibition of infrared photos of animals at the Blijdorp zoo in Rotterdam, which runs until June. He tells me ...

On 4 large canvas prints each 1-2 meter I show several different zoo animals taken with a digital infrared camera. In cooperation with Blijdorp I had the opportunity to get very close to the animals.

Associated Online Galleries

2010-03-03T13:15:00.009Z

At the risk of this becoming so large as to be difficult to manage I have started a list of web site galleries of infrared images that are linked to us and hence to the project. They are not so much events as they will probably be available all the time but I appreciate the linking.

First up, besides my own, is casework from Andrew Casey. This is a work in progress and not everything is infrared, but the captions will tell you which are.

The deal is simple, if you have an online gallery of infrared images and would like to appear in this list then include the project logo on your front page, include a link to us (use the logo on your home page if possible), and let me know by emailing me at: .

Four Visions on the road

2010-03-02T13:43:00.000Z

You will no doubt recall in a previous blog entry I told you about an exhibition in New York by four infrared photographers: Jill Enfield, Elizabeth Opalenik, Theresa Airey and Susan Ruddick Bloom.

I'm delighted to welcome them to Infrared 100 as the first exhibition to join the celebrations. You can find out more on their web site: www.fourvisions.net and see some great infrared images as well.

Here is the itinerary for the rest of their tour of the USA:

March 24 - April 29, 2010
Center for the Arts, Manassas, VA
Opening March 27th 6-8 pm
June 13 - 27, 2010
C. William Gilchrist Museum, Cumberland, MD
Opening Sunday June 13th 1-4:00 pm
July 5 - 25, 2010
Maine Media Gallery, Rockport, Maine
Closing event July 20th 6:30-8:00 pm
September 16 - October 15, 2010
Creative Center for Photography - Freestyle Gallery, Hollywood, CA
November 5 - December 18, 2010
Tilt Gallery, Phoenix, AZ

If you're in the neighbourhood (or is it neighborhood?) then please go along and support them. My New York spies tell me their NY show was great (if a little cramped). Note that the Hollywood show will be taking place across the centenary of Professor Wood's paper.

Infrared history and the big gap

2010-02-17T19:53:00.001Z

I am researching into the history of infrared imaging for a paper in the RPS Portfolio TWO book. It's fascinating to realise just how big a craze there was for infrared (or infra-red) photography in the early 1930s. Ilford and Kodak had just produced stable infrared film that was reasonably fast and it could be easily bought by professionals and hobbyists alike.

The Times (of London) ran a occasional series of large infrared landscape and aerial photos between May 1932 and October 1938. It started with a view of the French coast as seen from Old Park in Dover and visited several parts of the UK before heading off, by air, to Burma and India. A key inclusion was an aerial photo of the Everest range taken by the Houston-Everest flight expedition. The distance visible in infrared photos was even more exciting to this audience than the dramatic foliage effects. The Times art critic waxed lyrical about the landscape photographs, saying that objects such as trees are "more full of detail than than they are in the ordinary photography". He likens them to the work of a draughtsman and in February 1933 referred to the photographer as an artist in the context of infrared.

A selection of photographs from the newspaper went on tour around the world, starting in Folkestone in December 1932, under the title Britain Illustrated and several of the infrared photos were included. Infrared photography was a wonder of the age in the 1930s.

The Times exhibition could have been the first major exhibition of infrared photos, except that it wasn't dedicated to them. That distinction probably goes to Invisible Light, organised by Robert Cartmell for the Smithsonian in 1980, which also travelled. Robert is noted for his photographs of roller-coasters and he took up infrared photography sometime in the 1970s and persuaded the Smithsonian to share his enthusiasm. Invisible Light was solely a contemporaneous collection whereas the RPS exhibition in October will have an historic element as well into which, recursively, Robert's exhibition now belongs.

However, what happened to infrared photography between Robert Williams Wood's photographs published in the Illustrated London News in June 1911 and those photographs from the 1930s? So far I have found no references to any. Was this really an infrared dark age? Ironically it wasn't dark for infrared television as John Logie Baird developed his Noctovision in 1926 and he, and others, were actively working on coupling an infrared searchlight to an infrared scope of some sort in order to detect ships and planes at a distance.

But my unanswered question is whether there are any infrared photographs existing from those years.

Clark, 'Photography by Infrared' available online

2010-02-04T15:12:00.001Z

I have found that the second edition of Walter Clark's 'Photography by Infrared' is available online through archive.org.

This is the only academic-style book on the subject. It was first published in 1939 with a second edition in 1946 and a third (revised by Henry Louis Gibson) in 1978. This last edition went out of print in 1984. Clark and Gibson both worked for Kodak, with Gibson having a particular interest in medical photography.

The electronic copy has very clear text and line diagrams but rather poor reproduction of photographs. However, this is the best source of background on the technique, with copious references for further study, and the second edition is IMHO the best of the three. Text is searchable.

Link to the various versions is: www.archive.org

[Update June 30 2011: the version now seems to be rights-protected]

Infrared 100 on the BBC

2010-01-29T10:28:00.003Z

The Viewfinder blog on the BBC web site features infrared photography today, with a copious quote from me. This, coupled with a recent press release from FLIR, should help raise awareness of the centenary and the technique. (It was even featured on the front page of the BBC News web site for a short while.)

The top of the page shows the double-page spread from the Illustrated London News in 1911 that was published to coincide with Wood's lecture at the Royal Institution and his appearance in the RPS 1911 exhibition. Besides a Kodak HIE shot of mine there is a great colour infrared image of Bob Dylan, taken in 1968 by Elliott Landy.

One interesting thing: Phil Coomes, who authors the blog, also includes an infrared photo of a space shuttle taking off. When you look closely you can see what appears to be the notorious infrared hot-spot right in the centre. This hot-spot is something that appears in digital infrared photographs, not film, and is 'best' seen with the lens stopped down and with something bright towards the centre of the shot. Not all lens/sensor combinations suffer from it, but most do. I have not seen any scientific analysis of the cause of this but it is a bane of digital infrared photography. 2010 must be the year that the hot spot is vanquished!

A Brace of Exhibitions

2010-01-28T12:30:00.005Z

I've been sent info on two exhibitions featuring infrared photography, one on either side of the Atlantic.

To New York first ...
In a Different Light, with work by Theresa Airey, Susan Ruddick Bloom, Jill Enfield and Elizabeth Opalenik runs from today (Jan 28th) to Feb 27th at Umbrella Arts, 317 East 9th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. (I make that the East Village.) After today's launch the show is open Thursday to Saturday 1 to 6. Details on the Umbrella Arts web site. I am trying to persuade the ladies to make this exhibition an Infrared 100 event. How about it? [Later: see the first comment]

And thence to the UK ...
Simon Marsden will be showing some of his infrared photos of English gardens at Blenheim Palace from Feb 15th to March 28th. This is part of a group show with 10 photographers and only Simon uses infrared film. (Simon's web site.)

Fingerprinting and Infrared

2010-01-22T15:32:00.001Z

John Smith from the University of Westminster will be presenting an Infrared 100 paper to the Fingerprint Society's annual conference, which will be held at University College London in April. The paper is called Infrared Photography’s 100th Birthday and, as John says ...

This presentation celebrates the pioneers of IR photography, whilst demonstrating some of the latest developments in this ever-more accessible area of fingerprint imaging.

More info (eventually) on the conference web site.

Johns Hopkins Professor to Keynote Infrared 100 Symposium

2009-12-22T16:19:00.003Z

The joint RPS/RAS symposium in London in October will be keynoted by respected astrophysicist Professor Paul Feldman. Paul will be talking about Robert Williams Wood's life and work and will no doubt also touch on his own current research at JHU which has recently been in space ultraviolet astronomy and spectroscopy. (Although we're concentrating on infrared, let's not forget that Wood was also a pioneer of UV photography.)

The October symposium will take place in and around the RAS's premises in Burlington House. This complex of historic buildings in Piccadilly, central London, is best known as the home of the Royal Academy. If you have an interest in any application of infrared - photographic and thermal - then these are dates for your diary. We're also delighted to acknowledge the financial support of FLIR Systems.

Infrared 100 logo available

2009-11-05T16:55:00.009Z

2010 is almost upon us and it's time to start thinking about what events you can hold to celebrate infrared imaging.

I have produced versions of the Infrared 100 logo (as seen top-right) for web and print use. They are available for download and are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported licence. The only terms/restrictions are that ...

use is to promote the centenary of infrared imaging and that the logo will either link to http://www.infrared100.org or be accompanied by the string www.infrared100.org if a link is not appropriate ... this is the 'attribution'
the logo is not changed in any way other than in size but the aspect ratio of the logo must be maintained.

You don't need to sign anything to use the logos; download and use of the logos implies agreement to the licence terms.

Four versions are provided through the link, zipped together for convenience.

EPS and PNG for use on a light background
EPS and PNG for use on a dark background

You should choose which works for you.

Links:

Don't forget, if you're doing something, let me know and we'll promote it on this blog as well.

Applications of thermal imaging

2009-07-24T13:46:00.000+01:00

A couple of interesting thermal imaging stories recently on the BBC web site ...

I wasn't aware that there was sufficient thermal differentiation to achieve these kinds of results in a tree; it has interesting artistic possibilities of course. The toucan story just shows how infrared can tell us ever-more amazing things about nature.

What is Infrared 100?

2009-05-26T12:42:00.006+01:00

October 2010 will be the centenary of a landmark publication in the Royal Photographic Society's Photographic Journal. In the October 1910 edition there is a paper by Professor Robert Williams Wood, originally presented as the 13th annual Traill-Taylor Memorial Lecture, called Photography by Invisible Rays. As far as I know, this marks the first publication of an infrared photograph.

Wood demonstrated uses of both infrared and ultraviolet imaging. His influence over the medium was such that he gave his name to one of the most striking attributes of infrared photographs, the glowing foliage. This is known as the Wood Effect.

Some of Wood’s photographs were included in the 1911 RPS exhibition and as a result were published in the London Illustrated News in June that year. He also presented a paper to the Royal Institution.

This centenary can be used as an opportunity to celebrate and promote a branch of photography that has numerous scientific and medical applications, produces beautiful images of the world, and (in theory) is easier than ever to do with the arrival of digital cameras.