Elliott Landy's Band photobook includes infrared shots

You may recall photographer Elliott Landy and the iconic colour infrared photograph of his, showing Bob Dylan, that was included in the Infrared 100 exhibition.

Elliott has a distinguished portfolio of music-related material and has recently decided to pull together the best shots he took of The Band to produce a fine art photo book that he is funding via KickStarter. Actually I should say 'has funded' as he finally raised $193,626.

I was a much younger person when I shelled out pocket money for a copy of Rag Mama Rag by the Band. They were Canadians who famously accompanied Dylan on the Basement Tapes and then became a key recording act in their own right. Their roots approach to music was matched by their image, and this was captured by Landy on over eight thousand frames of film. Only about 30 ever got widely published, some as album covers and posters, and he considers this his best body of work. His relationship with the band is rare for a photographer. The only other notable long-term collaboration I can recall is U2 and Anton Corbijn.

The music occupied a hinterland between rock, country and folk; bringing an acoustic sound that became synonymous with Woodstock in up-state New York. For such a small place it has managed to carve a deep furrow in American musical history, and Vanity Fair calls Landy "the ultimate keeper of the Woodstock flame".

This photo of Levon Helm is one of the infrared shots (Kodak E4 stock in this case) which are included in the set. As with the Dylan shot, Landy didn't use infrared to exploit its characteristics (something I'm often guilty of) but more for what it could bring to the image.

This is the KickStarter page ... now reached its target ... and this is Elliott Landy's own web site, which you can explore for more of his images.

[Amended 30 Jan 2014 to give final Kickstarter figure.]

Consumer thermal camera launched at CES

The leading manufacturer of thermal images, FLIR, have launched a prosumer thermal imager at CES. I mentioned the $200 IR-Blue in an earlier post but this new device appears to be much more like the existing thermal images we've seen from FLIR and others while having a retail price point of only $350. This is an amazing price point and opens up a whole raft of new applications in a whole new market.

The unit fits onto an iPhone 5 (and 5s) and uses an iPhone app for control, display and recording - including movies - linking via USB. I couldn't find any information on spatial resolution but my guess is that the display is something like 320 pixels across. This is augmented by the ability to blend in a visual image to provide some detail to help identify features. The thermal core is FLIR's Lepton, which is a tiny microbolometer-based unit designed for consumer manufacturing scale. The thermal range for the scene is zero to 100 Celsius with a resolution of a tenth of a degree, which should suffice for most consumer uses and will certainly pick out a person in the dark.

You can find out more either by visiting the FLIR ONE web site or on the CES video that the BBC shot.

What is telling is that much of the FLIR promotional material is aimed at people who don't even really know what thermal imaging is or what it can do. A thermal image is (IIRC) regarded as a search in the US so there may be privacy concerns but a thermal image of a person does not show any significant detail. (That judgement was based partly on thermal imaging devices not being generally available to the public.) Hopefully we won't see any of the hysteria that greeted near-infrared photography and its so-called (and insignificant) X-Ray capability! Oh, and to save you asking, it's the area between the eyes and the bridge of the nose that best shows the body temperature, not the forehead.

I see this as a really significant piece of kit and welcome FLIR's initiative. Worldwide launch is Spring 2014 'at popular retail outlets'.

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?

Frogs and leaf growth

Back in January I noted research by into infrared reflectance of insects carried out by Michael Mielewczik and others. Michael has contacted me again about two more papers on similar subjects.

The first is Non-Invasive Measurement of Frog Skin Reflectivity in High Spatial Resolution Using a Dual Hyperspectral Approach [1] (on PLOS ONE here with a PDF here).



As before, the team used a camera with filtering that split near-infrared (specifically the red-edge between 675-775 nm) and blue to explore the 'colour' of frog skin. They also used a two further hyperspectral cameras sensitive to visible and near-infrared between 400 and 1000 nm and to SWIR (short wave infrared) between 1000 and 2500 nm. This image is of agalychnis callidryas using the red-edge camera.

I've come across hyperspectral cameras before and they're quite fascinating devices. They produce a multi-dimensional image where each of the pixels in the x and y plane have a complete spectrum recorded in the z axis ... so z records intensity at a range of wavelengths. This means that you can choose which wavelength (or wavelengths) to view the scene after the fact. This multiplies the amount of data dramatically of course.

The second paper uses infrared imaging to help a study of leaf growth. The paper is Diel leaf growth of soybean: a novel method to analyze two-dimensional leaf expansion in high temporal resolution based on a marker tracking approach (Martrack Leaf) [2], available on the Plant Methods web site. This study used dark beads attached to the margins of a leaf and a camera fitted with a 940nm narrow bandpass filter. At this wavelength the leaf is brighter than the beads which makes image analysis easier.

[1] Pinto F, Mielewczik M, Liebisch F, Walter A, Greven H, et al. (2013) PLoS ONE 8(9): e73234. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0073234
[2] Mielewczik M, Friedli M, Kirchgessner N, Walter A. Plant Methods 2013, 9:30 doi:10.1186/1746-4811-9-30

[Note: corrected information about the hyperspectral camera added 31 October]

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