From invisible rays to the surveillance society

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

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

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

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

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?