I’ve been bad; very bad

After trying, with only partial success, to cull my camera collection, I ended up returning one camera to active service, buying another camera, and had a third camera boomerang back, from 2012. This probably isn’t good.

Originally, I had put my Fujifilm X-M1 up for sale, but it sat without interest over the winter months. Then, on a whim, I decided to send it away to be converted to infrared. It came back from Oz at the end of October, just as we were leaving for Oamaru. 

Oamaru public gardens - Fujifilm X-M1, 720nm Infrared.

I loved the results, so that’s one camera that's now back on active duty.

Probably, my greatest sin (though not the most costly) was pressing the “Buy Now” button on a Fujifilm FZ-3000. This is a somewhat bizarre-looking film camera from the early 1990s. My excuse was that it was brand new and still in its original packaging - a rare find for $60.

Auto everything, the camera was light to carry and simple to use. When I want to shoot 35mm film without the hassle of carrying around the Nikon FE, this is surely the camera to use. 

West Oxford Hotel - Fujifilm FZ-3000, Ilford FP4+, Rodinol.

Unsolicited, my son returned the Nikon D80 that I had given him in 2012. He had replaced it several years ago and it had been sitting unused ever since. Who wants a 10Mp digital camera in 2022?

Nostalgia beckoned and, after kickstarting the battery into life, I took it out for a walk. Low expectations here. But, what I hadn’t factored into my thinking was that software has improved leaps and bounds since I last used this camera.

So I ran the 10Mp files through Topaz Photo AI, and out popped some stunning 40Mp images that compared very well with my current cameras. I was a bit gob-smacked, to be honest.

View to Mt. Oxford, across Pearson Park, Oxford, NZ - Nikon D80.

Now I’m in a bit of a quandary; I have a perfectly usable DSLR camera which won’t be worth much (because, low specs) but produces beautiful images for anyone with the right software (e.g. me). Should it join the other nine cameras on active duty, each wagging their tails like dogs in a pound awaiting adoption?

What to do?

IR Chrome

Time-ball station, Lyttelton Harbour

My latest camera arrived in the post the other day. It's a Canon Elph, converted to full-spectrum infrared and fitted with the latest IR Chrome filter from KolariVision. I might talk about the Elph later, for now, this is about the IR Chrome filter.

The IR Chrome filter was designed to replicate the look of Kodak's Aerochrome film from the days when we all shot film. Aerochrome is now history and I never got to use it, so I don't know how well this filter matches the original film look. What I do know, after only a short acquaintance, is that it produces some stunning results.

Pearson Park, Oxford

What the IR Chrome filter does, is capture quite natural colours in everything that doesn't reflect infrared wavelengths. Anything reflecting infrared (grass, trees, etc.) is produced in brilliant red tones. Seeing everything that should be green, represented in red, can be a bit disconcerting at first but somehow the simple green/red swap doesn't seem as confronting as some other false-colour infrared representations.

It's important to get a good white balance set in the camera and this filter white balances to a very high Kelvin - something north of 50,000K (normal daylight photography is around 6,000K). Fortunately, the Elph can handle this but, if you shoot RAW, your RAW converter may not - mine tops out at 50,000K but many won't go beyond 25,000K and that's just not enough for the look you see here.

Provided that the camera can set an appropriate white balance, then the JPG files from the camera will have the correct white balance baked in and that is what I have been using for these shots - until I resolve the RAW processing issue.

Sumner Beach looking towards Cave Rock

It's not all brilliant reds, sometimes it just pink; like these tiny black muscles clinging to the rocks but reflecting infrared, and the trees and bushes - too distant to make a bold statement. It's a strange world that this IR Chrome filer portrays, but one worth exploring and full of new compositional opportunities for the photographer to learn.

Sumner looking towards the Southern Alps

The hidden world of infrared

Holy Innocents Anglican Church, Amberley

When processing infrared pictures, I'm as guilty as anyone of brushing aside the copper/blue colours captured by a properly white-balanced infrared camera. Either I take away the colours to go black and white or I rush into swapping colour channels so that I can get back to a familiar blue sky. This last month, I have been trying to do my colour infrared processing only in Lightroom, using just the tools that Lightroom provides out the box and retaining the captured colours.

Maybe I've been looking at these colours for too long, but they have grown on me - do they work for you too? Let me know.

Shelter from the storm

A stormy day, an abandoned house and Irene, my infrared camera. I'm quite pleased with how this turned out; usually, IR photography is a sunny day activity for me, but the subject caught my eye and the false colours add an 'other worldly' look to what would otherwise have been a rather drab scene.

Irene's view

Yesterday, I showed Tillie (The Sony RX100) our mountain. Today, it was the turn of Irene, the Canon Infrared.

I liked Tillie's take on the mountain but Irene, as usual, came up with her own unique perspective on the same subject. I think it's more graphic, the mountain more present. It's a good reminder that how something appears, depends as much on how we look at it, as it does on the thing its self.

Perhaps, when life begins to look a bit flat, we need an Irene who can look at the same thing and say, "Yes, but ..."

A short stroll in Infrared

Now that it's post Christmas, we are in stay at home mode until the road madness subsides. This morning it was a short stroll down town before the temperature rises too much. I find it hard to photograph my own stomping ground; everything is so familiar. So, this morning, I took the infrared camera in the hope that a different wavelength might provide some inspiration. Nothing awe inspiring here, just a rather different type of holiday snap.

On our street - white leaves against dark sky

My favourite cafe 

Pearson Park looking toward Mt Oxford

Memorial - Pearson Park

Path in Pearson Park - looks like snow (it isn't)

Maggie Pie taking flight

Across the cricket field to Mt Oxford

Looking East from Pearson Park

I like the way that foliage fluoresces almost white with infrared, while clear sky is almost devoid of IR and turns nearly black. The middle of a sunny day isn't the best time for ordinary photography but it is a great  time for IR.

Getting what you want

Mt Oxford, Canon A590 IR, 1/220 sec, f5.6, ISO 80 (8 frames)

Usually, when I set out to capture a particular picture, I come back with something quite different; either because circumstances prevented the intended picture or because I get distracted by something better. Today I came back with what I wanted - a picture of Mt Oxford taken from the township - in infrared.

This picture just wouldn't work in a normal photo; the tones would all be too similar and would merge into a mass of green-brown sameness. In IR it's a totally different story, with the trees fluorescing brilliantly against the hills and sky.  

More on the infrared front

Today the sun shone. Not a big deal, except for the fact that we hadn't seen the orb for about three weeks (how very British of us) and that last Tuesday, my camera came back from the States having had an infrared (IR) conversion and I was itching to try it out in sunny conditions.

IR photography captures the world as we can’t normally see it. Clear skies, water, roads and many other things reflect very little IR while clouds and foliage, including grass, reflect a lot and glow with ghostly IR brightness. IR cameras capture the IR wavelengths in the same way that a normal camera captures visible light so we can process the camera data in exactly the same way; making the invisible, visible.

A trip to the gorge bridge and a quick walk around town produced the following results (presented here in soft pink and deep blue hues):

The Waimakariri Gorge bridge

Back road

The new town clock

Pearson Park playground

I was shooting at f8 with ISO 80 and getting exposure times of between 1/40 and 1/60 second. About one stop less than for visible light. All the metering and auto focusing worked fine and it was just like shooting with a normal camera.

The camera was an old Canon A590 IS which had sat in a draw unused for a few years. The conversion was done by a company called Kolari Vision (www.kolarivision.com) and, while the postal services took their usual time, Kolari Vision turned it around within 4 days (including a weekend) and did a top-notch job.