Laurie Klein: New book and Infrared Photography Course

 The first edition of Laurie and Kyle Klein's book, Infrared Photography: Artistic Techniques for Brilliant Images, came out in 2016 (and was featured here). Now there's a new edition from Amherst Media with extra input from technologist Shelley Vandegrift. I haven't as yet seen the new edition but I like the earlier books so this should be worth consideration.

Info on the book is on this web page.

Laurie and Shelley are also giving a three day "Intensive" course towards the end of September. This will be held using the ubiquitous Zoom running from noon to 1700 (I assume east-coast USA time) and with a course fee of $695. It's aimed at photographers across a range of infrared experience. The middle day will be a practical, where you shoot around your own area with the opportunity for discussion. More info on Laurie's web site.

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.

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.

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?

The physics of near-infrared photography

Klaus Mangold (a photographer), Joseph A Shaw and Michael Vollmer (who are physicists) have just published a paper, The physics of near-infrared photography in the European Journal of Physics. This is the best technical paper on the subject that I've seen since Clark's book Photography by Infrared (which went out of print in 1984).

The European Journal of Physics has a policy of making papers freely available for 30 days from publication, although you will need to set up an online account to access it.

Amongst other things the paper tells us that red wine, Diet Coke and even espresso coffee are transparent to near-infrared wavelengths.

This is the URL: stacks.iop.org/EJP/34/S51

The citation is Eur. J. Phys. 34 (2013) S51–S71

... and now the Marsden calendar

If you fancy a 2013 calendar of infrared photographs ... and sorry but I don't do one .. you should look at a collection of superb infrared photos in the latest edition from Simon Marsden's archive.

Available from the Marsden web site. Even if you don't fancy the calendar you should look at the photos: all taken on Kodak HIE from Simon's private refrigerated stash.