Dune movie scenes shot in Near Infrared

One of the big cinematic releases at the moment is the second part of Denis Villeneuve‘s interpretation of Frank Herbert's SF Epic Dune.

Cinematographer Greig Fraser decided to use near-infrared (NIR) imaging to show the weird environment of the planet occupied by the film's uber-villains, the Harkonnens. He had used the technique before, on Zero Dark Thirty in 2012 and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in 2016.

While the Australian movie BRINDABELLAS | edge of light in 2016 (see below) had used RED cameras configured for monochrome IR, Dune used an ARI Alexa camera but the basic premise is the same. The usual infrared blocking filter was removed and replaced with a 'black' infrared-pass filter.

The idea with Dune was to show the unreal environment the Harkonnen's inhabited. The first film had only shown interiors but the second part required exterior shots. One significant result of this technique is the surreal look of the characters, since NIR penetrates a few millimetres into skin (and the characters are hairless) and there is the well-known look of people's eyes and the inherent high contrast.

[Photo: Dune: Part Two Infrared Copyright © 2022 Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.]

I can point you to the following for much more information: Variety, NoFilmSchool, Kolari and ARRI Rental.

This provides an opportunity to review some of the history of near infrared in feature films.

Infrared film was a useful tool in the motion picture industry as far back as the 1920s. Kodak had produced their first infrared ciné film stock in 1925 and by 1937 it was also available from Agfa and DuPont. Agfa's was the first of what was described as the modern infrared film in that it was not a panchromatic emulsion pushed into infrared sensitivity. The new films were only sensitive to UV and blue and then to extreme red and infrared. This simplified the filter needed and a Wratten #29 (deep red) was the most common used. Sometimes infrared film was used in the making of travelling mattes (used to replace backgrounds in shots) but more often it was used in black and white movies to allow night-time scenes to be shot during the day, a technique now known as 'day-for-night'.

Not all the artefacts of infrared images were welcome however, and special makeup (usually lipstick) and set painting often had to be applied. Sometimes foliage was sprayed with green paint to hide the Wood effect and prevent shifts in tone. Paramount even painted an entire back-lot 'Brownstone Street' in special blue-grey paint called infra-red blue so that it would look the same on both infrared and panchromatic stock. The 1941 DuPont film was welcomed by cinematographers because of its lack of Wood effect and the three apparently competing emulsions had actually found slightly different and complementary niches in this specialised application.

By the 1960s the movie industry was moving from black and white to colour and infrared's abilities for day-for-night shooting were obsolete. But occasionally infrared filming was used for artistic effect.

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.

Much of Soy Cuba was shot using infrared film, with characteristic bright foliage and dark skies. The film stock was actually manufactured for use by the Soviet military, so it was quite a coup for the production to access some of it.

More recently, movie-maker Mike Figgis has been experimenting with low light and infrared photography using consumer video cameras with Sony's Night Shot facility. His 2001 film Hotel includes scenes done this way, to such an extent that the actors in the scenes could not actually see each other during filming.

The director of 2006 movie Wristcutters (A Love Story), Goran Dukic, had intended to use Kodak Ektachrome Infrared extensively to provide the look of the film's afterlife for suicides setting. Kodak provided unique super-16 format stock for this purpose, but after shooting some tests Dukic decided to use post-production techniques rather than infrared film. Some of the test sequences were shown on the film web site and on the published DVD. The production eventually sold off their unique stock for $300 per roll.

In 2015 film makers Glen Ryan and James van der Moezel of silver dory productions in Australia released a movie to exploit the monochrome infrared abilities of the RED digital cinema camera, called BRINDABELLAS | edge of light. It was described as “the World’s first near-infrared feature” and was shot in 4k resolution. I wrote it up in a blog post at the time, and the movie is still available on their web site.

Since most NIR-converted stills cameras can now shoot movies as well, the scope for infrared movies has expanded greatly over the past century.

James Jarché Infrared

I've mentioned in a previous post that the famous press photographer, James Jarché, had experimented with infrared photography in the early 1930s. I also noted that he had used IR to document the photographic manufacturing process for Ilford.

I recently managed to buy a copy of his memoir, People I Have Shot, and this includes some plates. One of them was taken by an unknown Ilford employee showing Jarché taking one of the photographs at Ilford's factory.

Here it is, captioned The Author Shot by Infra-red Rays.

Quote-unquote

When reworking my Invisible Light web site (link here) I decided to include a few quotes that seemed relevant for the subject of infrared photography.

One, I copied from Walter Clark's Photography by Infrared and which comes from William Henry Fox Talbot, in his 1844 book The Pencil of Nature.

... the eye of the camera would see plainly where the human eye would find nothing but darkness.

It's likely that Fox Talbot was aware of Herschel's discovery of infrared about 20 years earlier but whether he's thinking of this, or just of generally being able to see something otherwise invisible, I don't know. The current legal definition of a photograph includes any image using any form of radiation that can be made visible, so does not just include the visible spectrum.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine exactly when it was realised that what you see is not all that you get, at least when it comes to the electromagnetic spectrum. Certainly, the remarkable Émilie du Châtelet, in her 1738 paper called Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu suggested that

... there are other colours [emitted by stars] in Nature than those we know in our world.

Although such colours would turn out to be invisible. The simple French belies the significance of the idea.

Il est très-possible que dans d'autres systêmes, il y ait des Soleils qui projectant plus de rayons rouges, verds, &c. que les couleurs primitives des Soleils que nous ne voyons point soient différentes des nòtres, & qu'il y ait enfin dans la Nature d'autres couleurs que cells que nous connissons dans notre monde.

William Herschel in his paper Investigation of the Powers of the Prismatic Colours in 1800 is probably the first to give a name to these new rays ...

... radiant heat will at least partly, if not chiefly, consist, if I may be permitted the expression, of invisible light.

The first use of the term infra-red that I tracked down (via the OED, where else) is from 1881 in Nature; a lecture on solar physics by Captain (later Sir) William de Wiveleslie Abney.

HP Lovecraft, in his 1924 story From Beyond, was somewhat more worried about what might be revealed than Herschel or Fox Talbot ...

With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.

Roger W Hicks in his 1992 book Successful black-and-white Photography: A practical Handbook was not too fond of the medium.

Apart from its novelty value, I cannot see much reason to use infra-red film other than for scientific purposes. When you have seen a few infra-red pictures, you have seen the lot.

He's not alone: even Ansel Adams was sceptical though he did admit it could work in the right "imaginative" hands.

My favourite, to finish and to contradict HP Lovecraft,  comes from a book about early television, by Ronald F Tiltman in 1927. He has a chapter on Logie Baird's infrared television system, Noctovision, and says ...

Infra-red rays…are quite well-known and highly respectable rays, and have no connection with any much-talked-of death ray or other mysterious rays.

Weegee and Kubrick: The infrared connection

I have recently been reading Christopher Bonanos' biography of the famous New York photographer Weegee. Weegee's reputation grew in the 1930s as a news photographer covering mostly crime and fires at night. He soon developed a style that transcended standard news pics partly due to his innate sense of a good image, but also his shots of the reaction to events, as much as the events themselves.

One item in Weegee's armoury, besides his police radio and pocketfuls of flashbulbs, was infrared. He picked up on it in the early 1940s, a few years after it become available from companies like Kodak through regular retail channels. Before the mid 1930s, if you wanted to take infrared photographs you had to sensitise the plates (for it was plates) yourself. Now there were plates with a sensitivity beyond 700nm which could survive being retailed and being carried around by a busy photographer.

Bonanos places Weege's first use of IR for publication in April 1942, shooting during a wartime blackout drill. He returned to the medium "again and again" using the phrase "Made with invisible light" and many of his most recognisable shots were made this way. He shot audiences in cinemas, the opera and even a circus. Sometimes by rigging IR flood lights or more often by using flash with special IR-pass coated flash bulbs.

My favourite, entitled Opening Night at the Met was taken on December 3rd 1944 and shows a small group in the audience, including a priest and a lady with opera glasses. Behind them stand two women and a man. He is displaying classic IR 'five o'clock shadow' (caused by IR penetrating the skin slightly ... he was probably clean shaven) and one woman shows another feature of the infrared look, which makes eyes look like dark pools. This may well be Kodak film but it shows little of the usual IR film look with halation. This is simply because it would have been a half-plate negative: the effects are there but more subtle than we got with 35mm film.

I can't directly show you the image but I can link you to it on the Getty site. It's a gem: Opening Night at the Met. They're watching Faust by the way.

Getty have 84 more examples of Weegee's infrared photography. This search will get you there. Alternatively, there are 43 shots online at the International Centre for Photography, where Weegee's archive is held. These include some of him with his infrared kit, ready to shoot, and even disguised as an ice cream seller.

Via the Bonanos book I discovered that not only was Stanley Kubrick an admirer of Weegee (his "last great set of photographs" was shot during the filming of Dr Strangelove) but Kubrick used infrared several time during his earlier career as a photographer. Some examples of his work for Look magazine can be found online, although it's unclear how many were actually published. One striking shot, very reminiscent of Weegee's work, is from a set Kubrick shot for Look in a set titled "Park Benches-Love is Everywhere," from 1946. In it, a young couple are seen disturbed in mid-kiss on a fire escape, looking up at the camera. It has the classic characteristics of an infrared portrait, with dark-pool eyes, and the light pattern tells us it was shot with flash.

You can find the fire-escape photo, along with other Kubrick stills work, in this review of a retrospective exhibition in 2018 called Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick’s Photographs.

There's some interesting information on infrared flash in a blog post by social documentary photographer Daniel D. Teoli Jr, including the kind of bulbs used by Weegee. In case you're wondering, electronic flash guns do give off infrared, so you can filter them for candid photography. Usually, no-one will see the flash unless they are looking at the gun, in which case they'd maybe see a brief dull red light. This would be partly due to the very low sensitivity of our eyes to very deep red going on infrared (0.01% of our green sensitivity at 750 nm according to Allen's astrophysical quantities) and to the tiny amount of deep red that the filter lets through.

Christopher Bonanos' biography of Weegee is called Flash: the Making of Weegee the Famous and is published by Henry Holt. It's a very readable account not only of the man's eccentric life but also, in passing, builds a picture of what it was like as a jobbing news photographer on a crime beat in New York between the 1930s and 1940s in New York. And I am cited twice in the notes.

James Jarché and early infrared photography

The legendary press photographer, James Jarché (coincidentally the grandfather of the Suchet brothers), was also a pioneer of infrared photography ... or infra-red as it was denoted in those days.

He tells in his memoirs that in 1932 ...

... the Editor of the Daily Herald, Mr Spooner, suggested that I should try to get a picture of an audience in a theatre, during the showing of a film, when the whole house was in darkness. [...] So I went one evening to the Carlton Theatre in the Haymarket, during the performance of 'The Sign of the Cross, to see what could be done. Mr.Short, an expert from the Ilford Photographic Plate Paper and Film Manufacturers, came with me. By a priwous arrangement with the management of the theatre, six infra-red lamps had been fitted to the balcony. [...] Hidden by the darkness, and wthout attracting any one’s attention, I shot an audience I could not see, giving nine seconds' exposure. That is less than is required to take a phbtograph in a lighted room. [...] I made several experiments that evening with different exposures, varying from six seconds to ten seconds. I was very doubtful whether they would be successful, but when I developed the plate, they were as clear and sharp as though the shots had been taken in broad daylight.

He also describes using the heat of a hot clothes iron to take an infrared image in his darkroom, with an exposure of an hour, and being asked by Ilford to photograph the plate manufacturing process (in the dark).

Some of his photos are held in the Getty collection, which you can find with this search.

He also mentions an infrared photograph of the 1932 Armistice Day commemoration at the cenotaph in London, which was taken (but not by him) using an infrared plate because of the poor weather. The image appeared in the Manchester Guardian on November 12th that year.

Jarchés autobiography, titled 'People I have Shot' is available on the internet archive, which claims that it is out of copyright. That may be the case in the USA but since he died in 1965 it will still be in copyright in the UK.

Infrared photos on 'Britain from Above'

My attention was recently drawn to an amazing, and freely viewable, archive of aerial images on the Britain from Above site. This features images from the Aerofilms collection of 1.26 million negatives dating from 1919 to 2006 which also includes the AeroPictorial (1934-1960) and Airviews (1947-1991) collections.

As you probably expect, I tried a search on infrared and up came 39 hits, all from the 1930s. This is the link to that search and here is an example image ...

The photograph shows the River Thames in London from Westminster Bridge to the sea, seen from the west, and was taken in 1934.

As with all the images here, there is some patterning from the original negatives but they look to have been taken from the open cockpit of a biplane (wing struts are visible in some) and date from 1932, 1934 and 1937. In 1932, off-the-shelf infrared plates were just appearing in shops, from Kodak and Ilford (and possibly others) so this is really early days. The earliest images in the collection predate the aerial shots published in the Times, and are not of such good quality, but I count them as historic nonetheless.

If you're interested in further aerial infrared adventures from the 1930s then please check out my post Biggles shoots infrared photographs over Mount Everest.

Infrared or infra-red

Over time, the balance has shifted between these two names for the radiation with wavelengths beyond red. William Herschel, who discovered infrared radiation, called them calorific rays and the earliest citation is for the word infra-red in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1881 in Nature; a lecture on solar physics by Captain (later Sir) William de Wiveleslie Abney. In a paper the previous year Abney had called it ultra-red, presumably influenced by the term ultraviolet. (The term ultraviolet had appeared in a paper by Sir John Herschel in February 1840; although he preferred to call them lavender rays, considering ultraviolet to be an uncouth appellation).

I had, from my researches in newspapers and online, come to the conclusion that infra-red gave way to infrared in the 1960s and if you do a Google search on each term today you will find that infra-red nets approximately 2.47 million hits while infrared nets 38.4 million.

Having discovered Google's Ngram tool I thought I'd run the terms through that. This is the result (infrared is in blue) ...

In this case, based on the words in books Google has scanned, we see a distinct cross-over in 1940. Click on the image to go to the actual Ngram result. I have included infra red, but there are very few instances of that and some are errors where the hyphen was missed out. There are some results prior to 1880 but on closer inspection they seem to be spurious, either due to incorrect document dating or scanning errors.

[Citation for Google Ngram research: Jean-Baptiste Michel*, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, William Brockman, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden*. Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science (Published online ahead of print: 12/16/2010)]

APS biography of Professor Wood

The American Physical Society published a biography of Professor RW Wood in October. It was part of their This Month in Physics History series and commemorated Wood's Royal Photographic Society lecture in 1910. (The biog says this was the first publication of infrared photographs, but that was actually in The Century Magazine in February 1910.)

If you are unfamiliar with this fascinating, and omnitalented, chap then I suggest you give the piece a read:

www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201710/physicshistory.cfm

[Thanks to Professor Paul Feldman of Johns Hopkins for the heads up]

View from the roof

During the 1930s infrared photography was regarded as being one of the wonders of the age. It was featured regularly across the pages of national newspapers, especially The Times, demonstrating its ability to cut through haze and show distant landscapes.

This was brought home to me while perusing a 1938 book called Byways of the BBC which included the photo above, showing the view north from the roof of Broadcasting House towards Regents Park. Including an infrared landscape was clearly quite a reasonable thing to do then. BBC hands will realise that this is before the extension, let alone the current additions, so such a view is probably not available now.

[Feb 21st 2018]

I now find this photograph is also included in the 1932 book the BBC published for the launch of the then new Broadcasting House.

Biggles shoots infrared photographs over Mount Everest

There has been news coverage recently of the digitisation and publication of films from the archive of the Royal Geographical Society, and BBC reporter Pallab Ghosh narrated a film on the BBC News channel about some of them. One such film comes within our purview, being a record of the 1933 Houston Expedition which flew biplanes over the Everest range. They shot movie footage and stills, including some infrared plates provided by Olaf Bloch at Ilford.

In the early 1930s, infrared photography was something of a popular sensation and from about 1932 newspapers regularly printed large IR photographs demonstrating the ability to penetrate atmospheric haze and achieve extremely long distance views.

Everest summit and Chamlang taken from 100 miles away

The published book documenting the expedition, 'First over Everest', goes into some detail about the infrared setup. Plates came from Ilford, and by this time the sensitivity of infrared plates was such as to allow exposures 'as rapid as one-sixtieth' of a second. Taylor, Taylor & Hobson loaned a lens with an aperture of 4.5 and a focal length of 25 inches (635mm). The camera 'was a somewhat rough and ready improvisation made of plywood' which was sourced with the help of The Times newspaper and its legendary art editor Ulric Van den Bogaerde (father of actor Dirk Bogarde). There was, presumably, a quid pro quo because the Times had first publication of images from the expedition. On May 8th 1933, almost exactly a month after the flight, the Times was able to publish the expedition's most famous photograph, showing the summit of Makalu, the fifth-highest mountain in the world and 22 km east of Mount Everest itself, rising above cloud from a distance of over 100 miles.

The camera was very big and heavy and required special mounting in the plane. It was three feet long by a foot square and was placed under the fuselage, hanging in vibration-proof mountings where this aircraft was designed to carry torpedoes, and set up pointing forwards so that the field of view did not include the bottom cylinder of the engine. Plates were changed through a hatchway in the floor of the observer's cockpit. The observer had to hang upside down and put his head and hands through the floor to reach the rear frame of the camera and so access the wooden double half-plate dark slide ... hoping that the wind didn't whip it out of his hands. From this position the camera shutter could be operated. Lining up the shot involved either using the plane's intercom or, if necessary, writing notes. The cue between pilot and observer to take the shot was done using a piece of string. A sharp tug telling to pilot to line up and fly right, with a reverse pull giving the cue to fire the shutter.

The size and weight of the infrared camera were such that it couldn't be fitted to the aircraft for the high altitude flights, so infrared photographs were taken on subsidiary flights, after the main sorties had been completed. There was the added problem that, being outside the fuselage, the camera and lens would have frozen up at the higher altitude. Electric heaters were used for both men and equipment (these were open cockpits) but heating an external camera would have taken too much current.

Even though it doesn't mention the infrared work, the 1934 documentary film of the expedition, which won an Oscar that year, was called 'Wings over Everest' and is well worth a look. It's available to view freely on the BFI web site. There is a definite 'Boys Own' feel about the whole affair, and the BBC described observer Major Latham Valentine Stewart Blacker as being a real life Biggles. While some of the documentary was re-enacted in a typically 1930s way that we now see as being wooden, the real people are featured. But the expedition was filmed as it happened, including aerial footage shot from the cockpit which is a combination of shots from three of the flights.

Two final notes: the expedition was named after Lady Lucy Houston (pronounced How-sten), who provided funds and was quite a character herself (check out the Wikipedia entry on her) and, as the BFI points out, the while thing was inspired by novelist John Buchan.

Professor Wood's slides

This is a tale I have been waiting to tell for a while.

Regular readers will know that in 1910 Professor Robert Williams Wood, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore USA, published an infrared landscape photograph. The Midwinter Number of the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, priced at 35 cents, appeared in February 1910. In this was an article by Wood called A New Departure in Photography, which included an infrared photograph of his summer home in East Hampton. As far as I know this was the first infrared photograph (as distinct from a spectrograph) to be published. Later that year Wood presented his seminal paper on photography by Invisible Rays to the RPS in London and then went off to Italy. While in Italy he took more infrared photographs, many of which were published in the Illustrated London News in June 1911.

I had thought that Wood's actual photographs from this time were lost, despite the set from his RPS lecture being made available for hire from famous slide dealers Newton of Museum Street, London. So the ILN printed versions were the only ones available.

Surprisingly I came across a web page from Chris Fastie. His late father was a contemporary of Wood's at Johns Hopkins and had been given some slides, large format 'lantern' slides, of Wood's infrared photographs. These included some from the Italian trip, but also included one labelled 'First infra-red photograph' which showed another view of the East Hampton house.

The label on the slide of the East Hampton photo (above) is interesting:

So this claims to be the first infrared photograph; different from the first one published. There isn't a date on it unless that is part of the missing text (could that be revealed under infrared light I wonder). Wood's biography refers to the first photograph being of 'distant hazy' mountains taken in 1908 but this would seem to be a label, probably written by Wood himself, contradicting that. Definitive?

You can read a more detailed account on Chris's web page here.

The house was (and apparently still is) on Apaquogue Road and he was famous enough for there to have been a postcard produced, early in the 20th century, showing the 'Home of Prof RW Wood, East Hampton LI'. You can see it here, as part of a book of old postcards of East Hampton by Richard Barons and Isabel Carmichael and from the collection of the East Hampton Historical Society.

At this time I contacted Professor Paul Feldman at Johns Hopkins (he took part in our symposium in London back in 2010) and told him about this discovery. It turns out that Chris Fastie's father Bill was Paul's mentor at JHU and they all know each other. Then, Paul decided to take a look in what he called 'the attic' in the Physics department and found some more slides. These look to be others from the same set but,as they don't include the 'moon cave' image published in the ILN, it is possible there are more out there.

[My thanks to Chris Fastie and Paul Feldman for sending me scans of their discoveries]

Havelock Williams: infrared pioneer in New Zealand

The 1930s turned out to be something of a golden age for infrared photography, as photographers could now buy infrared plates 'off the shelf' rather than having to sensitise themselves. This would also have made exposure more predictable. For example, UK newspapers, notably the Times, published many such photographs between around 1932 and 1938.

The interest was almost exclusively around the haze penetrating properties, allowing for long-distance photography, especially from aircraft. For this reason infrared photographs showing the Everest range were some of the images taken on the 1933 Houston Everest Aerial Expedition.

Among the photographers availing themselves of the potential of infrared photography was New Zealand photographer Havelock Williams. At this time he was living and working in Timaru in South Island and his daughter, Diana Rhodes, tells me "Infra-red photography was in his output around 1934, on large format glass plates of the South Island Scenery". It is unclear what stock (or stocks) he used and even whether he sensitised the plates himself. Diana has a box labelled Ilford Hyper-Chomatic Films, where her father has written 'Infra Red Albury' (if I can decode correctly), but I don't even know whether this was a box for plates or for prints of some of his IR images.

Diana has sent me a few of Havelock Williams's infrared photos from the 1930s. They are as spectacular as you'd expect, with the combination of IR's characteristic tones and New Zealand's scenery. Here are two of them ...

From Caroline Bay

Lake Tekapo, Takapo House and Bridge

Diana collated and edited his work to produce a book, With my Camera for Company, if you'd like to explore his life and work further. The Amazon UK link isn't as helpful as it might be, but if you're in New Zealand (or don't mind air mail) then this link is better.

Concerning a visit to Bath

A recent visit to Bath included the Herschel Museum of Astronomy, which occupies a house where William Herschel and his sister Caroline lived and is also home to the William Herschel Society. This isn't the location of his famous discovery of infrared radiation (by then he had moved to Slough) but it is from where he first observed the planet Uranus in March 1781. If you're in Bath I recommend a visit. It should give you some measure of the man and his times and will also remind you of how important a scientist his sister Caroline was as well.

While there I discussed the infrared discovery with the staff and was shown a section of the Herschel Chronicles book (originally published in 1933 and now available in facsimile) which includes correspondence between Herschel and his patron Sir Joseph Banks. The Chronicle's author notes that Herschel, as was common at the time, thought radiant heat was fundamentally different to light. We now know that the two are different only in their wavelength.

Banks is encouraging Herschel to use the term 'Radiant Heat' rather than Caloric, which Banks linked to the 'French system of Chemistry'. Time has proved Banks correct and Herschel was glad to take his advice, saying he was 'very ready to change the word Caloric for Radiant Heat, which expresses my meaning extremely well'.

RPS Journal Archive online

It's a momentous event for photographic historians. The Royal Photographic Society, who have just launched their revamped web site, have also put a fully searchable archive of the famous Phot J ... the Photographic Journal, now the RPS Journal, on line with free access and free text search. It's at archive.rps.org

You can find out the background to the project on the Townsweb Archiving blog.

I haven't really explored yet but the page scans look very good. My only comments are that you only see your results by Journal volume whereas a date would be nice, and to return to the search results you have to use the browser 'back' button: but that's being picky. It is a fantastic resource. Enter 'infra-red' and then 'infrared' as your search term and see how it all started.

Infrared inspiration

I took my FujiFilm IS-Pro camera with me on a recent trip to Brecon in Wales. This included a restful trip along the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal and, at one point, the canal crosses the River Usk on an aqueduct. The view from here, back towards the town, shows a bridge carrying the B4558 road across the river, with the Usk banked by mature trees. It made for an atmospheric infrared photo.

There was a conscious effort on my part to emulate a photograph that had got me enthused about infrared photography, many years before, and had stuck in my memory. It was in a scientific encyclopaedia and was part of a pair to illustrate a view in both infrared and blue/ultraviolet light, to show the difference.

What I later discovered was that the photograph was probably taken by Kenneth Mees of the Kodak Research Lab and also appears in his 1936 book just called 'Photography' and published by Bell and Sons in London. It is just captioned as a landscape but, in fact, the photograph is of the Veterans Memorial Bridge in Rochester, New York, the home of Kodak. Here it is ...

It seems that no copy of this image exists in the Kodak archives, but the bridge is sill there of course. It was completed in 1931 so was quite new when the photograph was taken.

This was my introduction to infrared photography. What was yours?

Tristán and Michaud

In a letter to the Times in 1932, CEK Mees mentioned long-distance infrared photographs of mountains, taken in Costa Rica 'in 1915 or 16' by Gustave Michaud and José Fidel Tristán, which were published in Scientific American. Researching to find this paper turned up a few interesting items by these two scientists.

The paper to which Mees referred turned out to have been in the December 26th 1914 edition of Scientific American and called Air Transparency for Infra-Red Rays. It did include views of mountains taken from San José in Costa Rica, demonstrating the haze-penetrating ability of near infrared. The plates used were spectrum plates by Wratten and Wainwright. These plates were produced sensitised to 800 nm but by using alizarin blue S the sensitivity was increased not only beyond 800 but also in terms of reducing exposure times to as short as two minutes at f8. One of those photographs is reproduced below.

Dragon Mountain from San José

In fact, the Scientific American paper was based on an earlier paper by Michaud published in the 7 September 1912 edition of the French scientific journal La Nature, including two of the San José photographs. This is remarkably early for published infrared photographs but we get a clue from the note at the start of the paper which says (in French) that Michaud was a student of Professor RW Wood. (You can access the paper, in French, on page 229 of this online digitisation of La Nature.)

It seems (assuming I am not confusing people with the same name) that Michaud was an American or Swiss (references differ) who had been in Costa Rica at the end of the 19th century working on surveying and mapping. If he was a student of Wood's then he presumably went (back?) to the USA to Johns Hopkins sometime between 1901 ... when Wood arrived there ... and 1912 ... when the La Nature paper was published, returning to Costa Rica and teaming up with Tristán. Tristán was considered an 'outstanding' Costa Rican naturalist, and published the first list of native insects (in 1897) with a species of flower fly named after him (ocyptamus tristani). I'll come back to the subject of insects in a later post but this duo collaborated during the decade on a number of applications of both infrared and ultraviolet photography.

Thus far these are the only people other than Wood and Mees of whom I have found evidence of work in infrared in the early years of the 20th century.

Matson infrared photographs

An interesting and unexpected source of infrared photographs from the 1930s is the American Colony in Jerusalem, later the Matson Photo Service. According to the Library of Congress, where the collection [infrared photographs | whole collection] is now kept, the colony was “an independent, utopian, Christian sect formed by religious pilgrims who emigrated to Jerusalem from the United States and Sweden. The history of the Colony is intimately linked to the photography collection it spawned.” Eric and Edith Matson continued the photographic work in the middle-East and around east Africa after the colony broke up in 1934. They were innovative photographers working with infrared, colour, 3D and aerial photography although most of the collection is conventional.

This is one of the infrared plates in the collection, entitled Haifa, looking across the bay from Carmel showing harbour & Acre beyond. It's a 5 by 7 inch dry glass plate, which begs the question of where this was sourced. Given the climate in what is now Israel my guess is that the plate was sensitised locally.

More detailed information on the colony and the collection can be found on this LOC page. There are thousands of fascinating images in the whole collection and many of them can be seen online. You can find a few more infrared photos by searching using infra-red but this also hits a lot of false drops since the term appears in a general descriptive field (hover over the thumbnails of the first few photos to check titles for the word infra-red). I should also add that there are photos taken around Africa as well as in what is now Israel.

Top of the World with Albert W Stevens

This week's breathtaking freefall from 128 thousand feet by Felix Baumgartner has reminded me of another high-flying pioneer who also plays his part in the history of infrared photography.

Up to 1956 the record for a balloon ascent was held by Albert William Stevens and Orvil Arson Anderson of the Army Air Corps who reached 72,395 feet on November 11 1935 in their sealed gondola named Explorer II. They launched from South Dakota with millions listening on live radio. [Pathé newsreel coverage here.] Stevens and Anderson, together with William Kepner, had made a previous attempt, 1934 in Explorer I over Nebraska, but the balloon burst and the intrepid trio had to parachute to safety from the plunging gondola. There's a good piece about Stevens and the preparations for this ascent in the March 17 1934 Literary Digest. You'll note the photograph of him and a huge aerial camera, for Stevens was an accomplished aerial photographer.

Many of his photos were taken on infrared film, to combat the problems caused by haze when photographing from altitude. He took the first photograph to show the curvature of the earth and he photographed the shadow of the moon on the earth during the 1932 solar eclipse over the US. His images from Explorer II included the highest photograph ever made (a record that also stood until the 1950s) and covering the largest area ever taken with a single lens, showing a horizon around 330 miles away. (The specification was 1/25th second using a Fairchild F4 camera with a Kodak 304mm f5 lens on Eastman infrared Aero film through a red filter.) This wasn't the longest distance Stevens managed to photograph. His 1933 aerial photograph of Mount Shasta in California was taken from a plane flying at 23 thousand feet from a distance of 331.2 miles. The atmospheric haze rendered the mountain invisible, so the camera was oriented using a compass. The Mount Shasta photograph, courtesy of the Kodak Archive in Rochester, was included in the Infrared 100 exhibition.

Stevens's adventures were usually undertaken with the help of the National Geographic Society and stories of his exploits and many of his photographs can be found in editions of that journal from the first half of the 1930s. The Explorer II gondola is now in the US National Air and Space Museum.

Thermal video of Concordia shipwreck

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.

Free Phil Trans

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.