- Digital Infrared Photography
Our senses strongly shape our understanding of the world, as
every photographer well knows, but they sample only small slices of the
reality around us. What might we learn and think and feel if we could hear
beyond 20-20,000 Hz, as our dogs do, or see beyond the narrow visible light
band at 400-700 nm?
Out-of-spectrum experiences have generally been beyond the reach of the
average photographer, but today's silicon-based consumer-grade digital
cameras make it easy to explore the strange and serene corner of the
invisible world found just beyond visible red in the near infrared (NIR)
band of the EM spectrum at 700-1200 nm (0.7-1.2µ) wavelengths.
The world as seen in the NIR is at once familiar and strange. The vastly
different tonalities in the sunlit images show how widely the
spectral properties of common natural objects differ in the adjoining
visible and NIR bands. Manmade objects are full of surprises as well. The
false colors are nothing more than artifacts deeply rooted in camera
hardware and firmware, with no direct connection to the objects imaged.
Colors aren't even defined in the NIR, of course, but the false colors can
add their own mystique to digital IR photographs.
I hope you enjoy my collection of Digital Infrared Photographs, made with a Nikon 995 camera which I modified with an internal IR cut filter possessing the following optical characteristics:
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