Infrared Photography
For reasons truly unknown to me, I recently decided to begin exploring the mysteries of infrared photography. I think I bumbled onto the topic while searching on YouTube for something else entirely. Fifty plus years ago, when I first got started taking pictures, infrared photography was a very exotic medium requiring special (expensive) film and extra fussing to achieve proper focus. Now in the digital age of photography…… it’s still expensive but in a different way. Now you need to acquire a modified digital camera that can “see” the infrared spectrum. The images you capture need to be processed a little differently but this can be accomplished in most current image editing software.
After some research I decided to take the plunge. I purchased a used Panasonic Lumix ZS100 that had been converted to what is called a “full spectrum” camera. I found this equipment being offered by a company called KolariVision. After I made this purchase I did some further reading and learned that with the full spectrum approach I needed to also purchase a set of filters to allow only the proper light spectrum to make it to the camera sensor. This, of course, added some more expense but I am hoping that this approach will give me as much flexibility as possible.
To keep this blog post short I will just offer up the above image as my first published IR image. I’ll try to share my journey in future posts as my progress permits. This image was, of course, shot at Valco Ponds near Lake Pueblo State Park on my Lumix ZS100 as a raw file. I used the in-camera raw processing function to produce a jpg that I transferred to my Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 where I used Google’s SnapSeed image editing app to produce the finished image presented above.
Gear: Lumix/Kolari ZS100