Ed Thompson Infrared Story

Back in September 2016 I wrote about a colour infrared project by documentary photographer Edward Thompson called The Unseen.

Ed has been building up a YouTube channel called Pictures On My Mind and this includes some explanations of the work he did with some of the last remaining stock of infrared Aerochrome, which was basically the same as infrared Ektachrome EIR.

The latest video outlines at length the shooting he did in Pripyat, Chernobyl, and included in The Unseen. This part of his infrared journey started with finding out that false-colour infrared film was widely used in forestry. The normal red look of healthy foliage would tend towards magenta when the foliage was 'stressed' and it was a good way of determining forest health from a distance.

Alongside the Chernobyl video is another one going into more detail about other parts of the Unseen project, but because it includes some nudes (to demonstrate IR's ability to allow you to see a few millimetres under the skin and to echo demonstration shots published by Kodak) this video is restricted and Ed has had difficuly making the most of his whole channel.

This video passes on a couple of interesting pieces of information about Ed's technique. One is that, certainly until he was totally au fait with the idiosyncratic film, Ed bracketed the shots. I always found this was essential for any infrared film but I have come across photographers who are able to get it spot on without bracketing. The other is that he says in the video that he used a visually-opaque R72 filter to get the very deep reds that he achieved. Usually you'd use a minus-blue filter (yellow) with EIR. Those reds are mind-blowing!

Each section of The Unseen represents different applications of infrared photography with others including art investigation and restoration and medical imaging. (In fact the third edition of the standard text, Photography by Infrared, was written by Lou Gibson, who was a pioneer of medical photography.)

So I can recommend Ed's YouTube channel and especially The Red Forest of Pripyat Chernobyl. Enjoy!

Second Band volume coming from Elliott Landy

Almost exactly nine years ago I wrote about Elliott Landy's Kickstarter project to produce a book of his photographs of The Band, that bunch of Candian musicans who also,famously, backed Bob Dylan for a while. [Read the original post.]

That volume contained 200 photos chosen from the thousands that Elliott shot while in their company. Choosing a set is a difficult task, and lots of great shots are always left behind. So he has decided that it's time for a Volume Two! And he makes these pages because Elliott Landy included infrared film in his toolkit and, just as there were some IR shots in the first book, there will be some infrared images in the new one; shot using 35mm Infrared Ektachrome.

Here's one of the infrared images from the first book to whet your appetite ...

You should visit the Kickstarter page of course, and decide whether you want to join in.

A few Infrared Photographers

It's always nice to come across other photographers who either specialise in infrared or who take the odd very good shot. So here are a few:

Kate Ballis is based in Melbourne and has a neat line in faux-colour digital images. As her online biog says "In her Infra Realism series, Kate creates unique, colour-drenched images using infrared technology." She took an IR-converted camera and experimented with filters to produce dramatic images.

Also doing interesting things with digital colour is Barnaby Attwell ... aka Barnflakes. He's based in Cornwall and published a thin volume of colour infrareds of Conrnish landscapes. His palette is different to Kate's, which demonstrates the variety of results you can get with digital infrared. I also added his book to the Invisible Light Bibliography.

More 'conventional' digital mono infrareds can be found with Pauline Rook. I came across her photographs in a craft gallery in Wells and find that her aesthetic is similar to mine (though I think her eye is better). Her web site, includes IR images shot in Africa as well as closer to home.

A final single image from Richard Mosse. Lately he's been shooting with thermal cameras but I was interested to come across a single shot of his in The Guardian newspaper recently. It's called The Amazon’s highway through hell (I think) and, very unusually, was shot using an 8 by 10 inch sheet of the legendary Kodak HIE film. To quote Oliver Cromwell, you can see the image 'warts and all' on the page but it's a great shot.

Paolo Pettigiani

Paolo Pettigiani is a photographer based in Turin. Since 2015 he has beeon working on a project called Infraland, using a full-spectrum converted camera and a 590 nm filter to shoot faux-colour infrared images.

Infraland transforms ordinary places into surreal landscapes unbound by human perception ...

A set of his photographs were published in the Observer newspaper last Sunday (Feb 6th) but you can see his whole project on his web site. With photosets on New York, the Dolomites, Dubai, the Maldives, Alps, Bolivia and Peru. It's a nicely-designed site with some lovely images: well worth a visit.

I am of course rather envious that he managed to get his photographs into the Observer.

Landy Dylan infrared photo for sale via Magnum Editions

The legendary photograph of Bob Dylan, taken using Infrared Ektachrome, by Elliott Landy is currently available to buy as part of the Magnum Editions project.

The price for the 8 by 10 print is £400 and £550 for a framed version. This edition is unique and is limited to 100 copies.

The photo is also available in an open edition in several sizes. The open edition images are signed.

The Magnum shop is in the USA, and I wondered about possible import duties into the UK (and Europe) but there is a note on the site that says "If your order is placed in EUR or GBP, taxes and applicable customs fees are included in the listed price." US buyers don't have that problem of course, just dealing with local sales taxes, which are separate.

Infrared Movie: Las Vegas in Infrared

I've been a bit quiet lately, as a result of moving house, so I thought I'd put up something really nice I recently found on YouTube (although it was posted in 2016).

The videographer, Philip Bloom, notes that he shot this with a Sony RX100 IV with its IR-blocking filter removed, and in slow motion to add to the fun.

Enjoy!

If you'd prefer the source page, go to this page.

Elliott Landy colour infrareds on sale

Elliott Landy, the American photographer, is famous for his images shot at the Woodstock festival and of Bob Dylan and of the Band. He includes infrared photography in his work, and his photo of Dylan was the highlight of my Infrared 100 exhibition in Bath in 2010.

Elliott is holding a sale of some of his colour infrared photographs, running until February 15th. He says:

I consider this body of Infrared Photos to be among my best work from the Sixties. Except for the one of Bob Dylan, people have overlooked these when collecting my work. The prints on sale were shot on Infrared Color Film in the late Sixties except for the ones of Janis Joplin and Richard Manuel in performance which I am including in this group because they share the same visual vibration, or feeling, of the infrareds.

You can find out more on his web site here: www.elliottlandy.com/valentines-day-infrared-print-sale. 

You'll see that two of the shots, of Janis Joplin and Richard Manuel in performance, are not infrared but have the same vibe. He refers to the film he used as Aero slide film, which is basically the same as the Ektachrome. At the time of these shots I think it was an older formulation which needed a very obscure development process known as E4. I used this version on occasion and had to mail it off to a medical photographers in Harley Street, London, for development. The later E6 version was a lot easier to use and develop.

The photographs on this page are of jazz musician Ornette Coleman and his son, shot in New York in 1969. Though they use the same film, the filter used is different, producing the varied colour effects. To some extent these are unpredictable when you shoot, part of the 'fun' of using that kind of film stock. They are included in the sale. [Photographs are copyright © Elliott Landy used with permission]

Life in Another Light

 I have mentioned Kolari Vision before. I used their Chrome infrared colour filter during my test shoot of various ways of filtering a digital camera for infrared photography. Yesterday I saw a photo piece in the Guardian about Kolari's competition called Life in Another Light, which includes various infrared categories and has resulted in some really amazing images. The Guardian shows some of the best ones but the Kolari page (although it loads somewhat slowly for me) also gives information about how they were shot ... and has lots more photos.

You should note that not all the photographs use infrared techniques. That isn't really clear in the Guardian but it is clear in the Kolari page.

One thing I think is proved here is that an infrared image should also work artistically as a photograph as many of these would be great even without the otherworldliness of IR.

Links:

The Guardian

Kolari Vision

Filtering a full-spectrum camera

My full-spectrum camera, a FujiFilm IS-Pro, has no built-in filter and shoots from near UV to near IR unimpeded. This also means that when I put a filter over the lens it also affects what I see through the viewfinder. With, say, a 720nm filter I am unable to see through the viewfinder so would have to use a tripod. Sadly the Fuji's live-view is pretty-well useless.

Many people replace the high-pass IR-blocking filter over the sensor with a low-pass filter such as a 720 or 820 nm to get around this problem ... at the small expense of loss of versatility.

In recent years I have used a deep blue filter, which I can see through to frame. Blue filters usually pass a lot of near IR. You can use a red filter of course, as you might have done with film, but I find the blue filter sometimes produces an interesting colour balance with minimal post-processing. Interestingly, the auto-focus works most of the time, which helps.

I recently bought a specially-designed filter for a type of colour infrared photography from the American company, Kolari Vision. It's called their IR Chrome Lens Filter, which I'll come back to in a moment. This nudged me into looking at results of a number of filters with the full-spectrum camera.

First, here is the camera output without any filter. This is basically a 'normal' colour image but with infrared contamination. You can click on the images to make them larger.

Next is a minus-blue (ie yellow) filter. This can be used to emulate the old infrared Ektachrome film ... see this blog page for more details.

Next comes the red (#25) filter.

Now the blue filter. Different black and white results can be achieved by either removing saturation or by selecting individual channels. (This also applies with other filters of course.) The green channel is useful because, with a Beyer filter camera the green channel has twice as many pixels as the red or blue. With this filter I find I need to under expose (according to the camera) by 3 or 4 stops.

This is Kolari's IR Chrome Lens Filter, which gives a good approximation of the old Ektachrome images. However, it is not exactly the same so is not as useful for foliage health analysis: but it's not a bad approximation.

I had achieved good results using neutral density filters in the past, with Sony's Night Shot, since the ND doesn't apply at IR wavelengths. So I bought a variable ND filter, which is basically two polarising filters together. You rotate one with respect to the other in order to reduce the amount of visible light going through. In this case once I had frames with minimal density I simply rotated the outer filter until I could only just see anything then fired the shutter. Autofocus worked and by trial and error found the exposure change: in this case under by 4 stops. There is a little (false) colour information left but this method works best for a monochrome result.

Finally, for comparison, here is a 720 nm filter result.

One thing this experiment also showed me was how bad the chromatic aberrations are around the edges in the lens I am using, which are quite noticeable with colour shots but usually vanish when reducing to monochrome.

For more on this subject, here is Kolari's page outlining the characteristics of their various filters.

Blue Mountains in Infrared

Photographer Steven Saphore has used his modified DSLR to take some nice shots of the Blue Mountains national park in New South Wales, Australia. A set of the images has appeared in the Guardian newspaper. The photographs are faux-colour but Stephen has applied the colour subtly, which makes for an interesting variation.

The description of the technique is slightly misleading, in that it implies that the whiteness of the foliage is due to chlorophyll being reflective at these wavelengths, whereas it's the chlorophyl itself being transparent and letting 'light' bounce around in the plant cells. But that's a nit-pick ... the photos are the important thing.

What colour is the sky in your infrared world?

If you take a digital photograph using a camera which has no infrared-blocking filter, infrared will pass through the colour-filters (the Beyer matrix) on the sensor and will register with the red, green and blue photo sites. With an infrared filter such as the common 720nm one, almost all the radiation reaching the sensor will be invisible to the naked eye. (Saying a filter has a wavelength of 720nm means that at 720mn the filter blocks 50% of the light with shorter wavelengths reduced more and longer ones by less.)

The three colour filters on the sensor will pass near infrared light but in differing amounts and that results in what seems to be a colour picture. I call this faux-colour to distinguish it from the false colour that infrared Ektachrome produced.

It will usually look something like this ...

Here the colour balance has been adjusted slightly to make the foliage appear white/grey but even without this change the sky is a reddish-brown colour.

If you don't like this you can change it since there is no correct version of this colour arrangement, it is purely an artefact of your camera's Beyer filtering when confronted with near-infrared.

The usual technique is to use the colour mixer in Photoshop (or similar) to swap the red and blue channels which results in this ...

There is an alternative way, which is quicker and produces slightly different results. If you convert the image from RGB into LAB colour then you can invert (make negative) the A and B channels to change that reddish sky to a blueish one. Neither of the A or B channels has a red-blue axis. Red-green (A) and yellow-blue (B) are the axes of the components: colours are defined by their position along those two axes (and the L is the luminance or brightness).

Inverting the B channel changes the sky to a blue colour ...

This is different to the channel swap result. Inverting the A channel has a much smaller effect on the image but you can do this as well as inverting B to get this result ...

So now we have three ways to post-process the faux-colour images. My personal preference is for the one with both LAB colour components inverted, but your mileage may differ.

Colour infrared photos from Normandy

Despite Kodak discontinuing their colour infrared Ektachrome film several years ago, some photographer have found ways to continue shooting false colour infrared images on film. An enterprising photographer in Germany, Dean Bennici, has sourced, trimmed, and then sold stock of Aerochrome over the past few years. He has recently been offering a negative false colour film, known only as CIR. This is still (just) available and is a 120 roll film. The larger image size makes a serious difference for this kind of image as photographer like Richard Mosse and Ed Thompson have demonstrated.

I recently came across the work of Lynda Laird, who has used that CIR film to document what remains of the coastal bunkers that were part of the defences along the Normandy coast. You can find her photographs on her web site, and here is an example. As you can see, the film produces very nice results.

Where the film originated is a bit of a mystery. Dean tells me his source was in Russia, but there were no identifying markings on either the canisters or on the film itself. My personal feeling is that it is either Russian or, maybe, from the erstwhile East Germany. I have a document on Soviet Russian infrared technology and I must dig through it to see if there are any clues. After all, there was the extraordinary infrared movie, Soy Cuba, shot by Cubans and Russians using Soviet military-grade infrared B+W film in the 1960s.

From Wimbledon to the remote Pacific

Two online news stories caught my eye recently.

The BBC web site has a short video montage showing photographs taken by Belgian photographer Sanne de Wilde on the Pacific island of Pingelap. This island is notable because a disproportionate number of the inhabitants are totally colour blind, a condition called achromatopsia. They basically have no functioning cones in their eyes. The cones are what provide us with detailed colour vision, while the rods are more sensitive but only register brightness and at a lower resolution. Our brains combine the two and while we think we see everything in sharp colour, this is not actually the case and only the centre of our vision is actually sharp and colourful. There is another difference between the two parts of our vision, which is that we process the rod images faster than the cone ones. The result of this is that if you look at a bank of TV screens, all showing the same programme, and watch for cuts between shots the screens you are not looking at will seem to cut first.

The colour blindness on Pingelap results from a genetic bottleneck, when most of the population were killed by a tsunami in the 18th century. One of the survivors happened to have the colour blindness and since the population was so small the genetic defect became more prevalent. Neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote about the island in his 1997 book The Island of the Colorblind.

Sanne de Wilde has also produced a book with this title but in her case she has uses faux-colour infrared photography as a way of looking at the islanders' condition and has produced some striking images. A 10 minute film was also shown at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival and a book is available (which has a UV-sensitive cover!). Check out the web site at www.sannedewilde.com and those of the book's publishers, Kehrer Verlag and Uitgeverij Kanibaal.

You probably know that Wimbledon fortnight has just finished and, with it, the 2017 tennis championships. The Guardian's sports photographer, Tom Jenkins, decided to take some faux-colour infrared shots at the championships and you can see the results on this web page. My only niggle is that whoever wrote the captions is confused between near-infrared and thermal imaging because these photographs are not thermal images and do not show heat. Nevertheless they are fascinating, partly because Tom has sometimes used selective focus to increase the otherworldliness of the scenes, making them take on the appearance of models.

Unseen book launch in London on Thursday

Ed Thompson's fascinating book, The Unseen, which I recently wrote up, is being launched this week. Unusually, the do is an open house and might provide an opportunity for an infrared get-together ... I certainly plan to go.

The place is the Photographers Gallery Bookshop, 16-18 Ramillies St, London W1F 7LW. You might know this as that street with steps at the end leading down from Oxford Street. Timing is between 1800 and 2000 on Thursday 27th October. Ed says ...

"I will be holding a free raffle and giving away prints, original spreads from the book when it was printed and other cool rare stuff to do with the project."

Coincidentally, last time I went to the Photographers Gallery was to see some of Richard Mosse's infrareds from the Congo ... but in that case the book was unobtainable.

Edward Thompson: The Unseen

This hardback book isn't your usual photographic monograph. For a start it's just over 260 pages long and then every image is taken using some of the last-remaining rolls of Kodak's colour infrared film. As the back-cover blurb says, this is the swan song of a particular kind of film, and of the particular kinds of images it was destined to take.

Ed Thompson is a documentary photographer, and for the past few years he has been exploring his photographic fascination with the different view of the world that this film provides. He has chosen some of the hundreds of potential applications to produce a series of smaller projects which, taken together, make up this book. Superficially, this may lead you into thinking that the book is disjointed, jumping between anatomical specimens, dystopian landscapes, portraits, an operating theatre, the sky at night and even images of paintings. Follow the interstitial text, however, and it will become clear.

The photographs look beneath the surface of the subjects, in some cases literally (that is, the medical poses and an Icelandic glacier). Infrared photography, both monochromatic and false-colour, has been used for remote sensing of plant health in agriculture, haze-penetration, imaging veins and other things just below the skin, and layers of artworks below their 'skin'. Whereas once infrared was thought of as a branch of astronomy - the 'new astronomy' as it was called - now it dominates the field. Ed's astronomical photographs are perhaps the weakest in the set but they deserve to be included ... and the Orion Nebula always amazes.

I think the book is called an atlas because the twelve chapters document an exploration, although you will find no diagrams showing oceans and mountains. You may, however, find a dragon or two, in the shape of photographs from the dead zone surrounding the Chernobyl power station. For me, these are the most poignant images: using one form of radiation that we can't see to suggest the other, more dangerous, invisible radiation all around.

If I have a technical quibble, it's that building a book from images where the predominant tone is saturated red is a printer's nightmare. Print lives in the land of CMYK, not RGB. I started off thinking some of the images were a bit dull, but they actually need quite a lot of light to bring them to life. Persevere, and you will be rewarded.

I've collected quite a few books of infrared photography and The Unseen is part of a tiny group specialising in false-colour infrared. It definitely deserves its place in a photographic library and in the history of the medium: whatever your reason for liking infrared photography, there will be images here to amaze you.

The Unseen: Atlas of Infrared Plates by Edward Thompson
Published by Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam
266 pages
ISBN 9789053308639
€45

Ed Thompson Kickstarts Book

Ed Thompson is running a Kickstarter campaign (is that what you call them?) for his book 'The Unseen'. If you're interested in Ed's thoughtful takes on false-colour infrared photography then you should have a look.

It's highly unlikely anyone will produce any more colour infrared film, so there's something rather wistful about looking through this book, knowing that the images represent the last ones to be captured using this idiosyncratic stock. It started life during the second world war as a means of detecting camouflage and was used extensively for remote sensing and medical photography. The Unseen takes a sideways look at the historic uses for the film with subjects like Chernobyl, bees and even a haunted village (Simon Marsden would have been proud).

The book is expected in June. My full disclosure is that I've helped Ed in a small way with some of the text.

URL: www.kickstarter.com/projects/1092524383/the-unseen-an-atlas-of-infrared-plates

New Books for a New Year

I've been notified of three photographic books that may be of interest, coming out over the next few weeks (or May in one case).

Ed Thompson's The Unseen: An Atlas of Infrared Plates has a May 2016 publication date from Schilt Publishing and a cost of €45. More information on their web site.

I love the idea that this is somehow an old-fashioned atlas of hitherto unknown territory ... down the spectrum with gun and camera (without the gun) in the manner of a Victorian explorer. One thing I would take issue with is the publisher's quote that "Thompson has created a swan song to the medium of infrared photography" since the technique is alive and well. What this is a swan song to is infrared film of course, and especially the false-colour infrared film that Kodak used to produce, and of which Ed is an accomplished exponent.

I've mentioned Laurie Klein, and her book Photographing the Female Form with Digital Infrared, before. Her follow-up is almost with us, co-written with her son Kyle Klein, and published by Amherst on January 12th 2016 at $37.95 (list).

I haven't seen the book on paper as yet, but there's a comprehensive preview on Amazon and it will also be available from other stores who stock Amherst's books..

Finally, a quick note to say that Elliott Landy's Kickstarted book of The Band Photographs (Big Pink etc) is now available in various enhanced formats from his web site ... and going fast ... (there's a preview there as well as on Amazon) and from book stores. Prices range from $45 to $500 and Elliott's web site is offering the first edition print of the book. I mention this because, although they are in a minority, there is a section of infrared photos amongst this set. I wrote more about this almost exactly a year ago.

October odds and ends

A couple of items for your interest.

Shutterbug published a lovely appreciation of Sir Simon Marsden on October 5th. I also found him very communicative and helpful at the time of the Centenary and really regret not meeting up, especially now I live a lot closer than I did in 2010. This has prompted me so that this year I've decided to desert Ansel Adams and get my 2016 calendar from the Marsden online shop.

Rather oddly, considering the piece dates back to August 2014, New Scientist just tweeted a link to an edition of their 'Last Word' column, which asks 'How far beyond the visible spectrum does a rainbow extend?'. The responses discuss both UV and IR extensions of what we see, and especially how those might be more dominant on other worlds such as Titan. It reminds me of the work of Robert Greenler who, having deduced that there should be an infrared component to a terrestrial rainbow, finally succeeded in photographic a natural one in 1970.

I recently had a visit from Ed Thompson and had a sneak preview of his upcoming book of colour infrared photographs. I'll write more about this when it's published but suffice to say there's lots of red and a delightful conceit in the way the book is packaged. In the meantime if you're in the vicinity of the Rough Print Gallery (14 Bradbury Street, Dalston in London) then images from the Red Forest and The Village portions of his epic Unseen project will be on show. The gallery Tumblr stream tells us that it's part of the White Rabbit Restaurant and the gallery is open 10-5 Wednesday/Thursday and during the restaurant opening hours. Starts 15th October and runs to the 21st.

I think that'll do for the moment.

Ed Thompson @ Photo-Forum

Ed Thompson will be talking about his series of colour infrared photographs - Unseen - at a Photo-Forum event in London on May 14th. His talk is alongside one by Lewis Bush, another photographer with an unique vision.

I wrote about Unseen last month: here and here.

The Photo-Forum event is being held at Calumet in Drummond Street, starting at 1800, and you can find out more on the Photo-Forum web page.

[Always happy to help promote exhibitions and talks involving infrared imaging: just drop me a line]

More on Ed Thompson 'Unseen'

I made it over to Bethnal Green yesterday to see Ed Thompson's 'Unseen' exhibition and, as I expected, found the images fascinating. There are only two days left but I do recommend that you get over to the Four Corners Gallery if you can. Ed very kindly gave me a print, and we chatted. I was impressed that he made such good use of this difficult film stock ... even more so since he found that he didn't need to bracket.

One thing that struck me was the silvery skin tone in the Vein series. I've been trying to figure out what might cause it: the illumination was flash and the images are almost always straight what was recorded on the film. I'll leave you with my favourite out of the Vein shots and a final note that Ed plans a book sometime soon. Details yet to be announced.