Outdoor Photographer – September 2019

For a different look at color photography, try these

shooting and processing tips using infrared digital capture

Text & Photography By Russell Hart

B

ack in analog days, when I was

photographing just about every-

thing with black-and-white infra-

red film, I never gave a thought to shoot-

ing color infrared. The slide film’s palette

of pinks, yellows and cyans, typified by

the fish-eye cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Are

You Experienced, was too far-out for me.

Now, decades later, I find myself

shooting color infrared because aside

from being able to change it to one’s

liking in post-production, it just looks

different—and better—when captured

digitally. Digital infrared is still those

crazy wavelengths beyond the red end

of visible light—but combine it with the

remarkable flexibility of digital capture’s

RAW files, and you have a marriage

made in photographic heaven.

At first, I converted all my digital infrared

files to black-and-white. For a few years, I

shot with the Fujifilm UVIR, a DSLR really

designed for forensic purposes, but I even-

tually graduated to a Nikon D600 converted

for shooting color infrared by LifePixel,

one of several companies that perform the

service. LifePixel offers a range of “filter”

options installed over the camera sensor

that enable you to record progressively lon-

ger waves of infrared radiation. The filters

that allow the longest infrared wavelengths

to reach the sensor produce image files

containing very little (if any) color, given

that those wavelengths are further from the

color-rich spectrum of visible light. I chose

the company’s Super Color filter, which has

a less-deep “cutoff” (590nm, for those in

the know) and therefore records quite a lot

of color information, though the RAW files

are strongly reddish. My reasoning was

that the resulting files’ color would allow

me to use the individual color sliders in

Photoshop’s black-and-white conversion

tool to control tonal densities and interre-

lationships in the black-and-white image.

At times, I liked the color file itself and

used it for my final image—though with

quite a lot of post-production work to

make it look a bit more naturalistic. This

Cranes Feeding At Sunset, Bosque

Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge

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