Recently, Bill has been doing some experimenting with digital infrared photography. Infrared photography can give an “otherworldly” look to your photographs. Foliage tends to reflect infrared, so leaves, grass and such tend to be near white. Still water and clear skies go quite dark, but clouds remain light. Below is a photo of a waterfall at Olmsted Island at the C&O Canal National Park in Maryland (this is on the path to Great Falls at the park – usually there is only a trickle of water here but the waterlevel was quite high when he took this recently). The leaves are the brightest objects in the picture, and the water before the falls is quite dark.

Falls Alongside Olmsted Island (c) 2008 William Lawrence

The sensors on most digital cameras are sensitive to light beyond what the human eye is sensitive to. The result is that the sensors can “see” a broader spectrum of light than the eye can. To keep this from interfering with photographs, camera manufacturers place a filter over the sensors to block out most of the light outside of the visual range.

However, some of the older Digital SLRs are still sensitive to near infrared light, which is not visible to the naked eye. A quick test of this on your camera is to take it into a darkened room with a TV remote control (most work with infrared light). Point the control at the camera and take a picture while activating the remote control. If you see light on the photo, you camera is capturing infrared light and displaying it in the visual spectrum so that you can see it.

Bill tried this with our old Canon D30 (note not a 30D – this is one we got in 2000) and found that it was sensitive to infrared light. He converted it for digital infrared photography by getting an infrared filter for it (a Cokin P007 infrared filter). You can’t see through the filter, so all composing has to be done before you put the filter on the camera. Also, while the camera does capture light in the near infrared spectrum, most of it is blocked. Most of Bill’s exposures were in the range of 3-10 seconds at f11 at ISO 400 in broad daylight.

Infrared can make an interesting addition to your photographic techniques. Bill is getting a DSLR modified specifically for infrared photography – more on this once we get the camera back and have a chance to use it.

In the meantime – here’s one more infrared photograph taken at Great Falls. This time from the Virginia side of the Potomac River in the Great Falls National Park.

(c) 2008 William Lawrence

If you’d like to see some of Bill’s digital infrared photography in person – please stop by our booth at one of our shows.