infrared
Pre-Photoshop Surrealism
There are times when an artist has to try something a little different to jar the creativity within. Edward Hopper did this often by moving between etching, painting, and sketching. He would paint portraits, landscapes, railroad scenes, restaurant interiors, houses, and even sunlight striking the interior wall in a house using pencil, pen, watercolor, and oil paint.
I am certainly no Ed Hopper, but I am finding that my narrow focus on military subjects, particularly Navy ones, is starting to feel a bit ordinary. Living in a Navy fleet concentration area, there are many military and industrial subjects to photograph, so I try to capture them in a different way.
Many digital photographers are well acquainted with software, like Adobe Photoshop, to manipulate image color, hue, sharpness, and exposure to some degree, but it can also radically change the image until it bears no resemblance to the original photograph. Artistically there is nothing wrong with this, but to me “re-photographing” digital images in this manner is more akin to the montages that I made in kindergarten with white glue and pictures cut from old Sears or Eaton’s catalogs.
I retired the Monochrome and Infrared galleries today and, in their place, created the Natural FX gallery. This is where I can place strange or unusual photographs that I made in a more traditional way. A couple of weeks ago, I took my 35 mm pinhole camera out of the closet, loaded it with a roll of Fuji Velvia 100 slide film, grabbed my tripod and light meter, and trekked out to the Bremerton waterfront.
Photographs made with a pinhole camera have a soft, ethereal quality that is hard to match with a standard lens. The camera, a teakwood box in this case, has been fitted with a thin piece of brass bored with a very small hole where the lens should be. I’m not sure of its size, but the hole is about one-hundredth of an inch in diameter. In 35 mm terms, that would be an aperture of about f/138. In broad daylight, an exposure on 100 ISO film takes about three or four seconds, hence the need for a sturdy tripod.
You never know what you will get with a pinhole camera. Sometimes it is hard to keep the camera stable on the tripod during the very manual exposure. The shutter is my fingertip. Inadvertent double exposures are common. Sometimes if the light is low, there is a significant shift away from the expected “normal” in color or hue of the finished image. Sometimes this failure of the Reciprocity Law leaves only a dark space on the film where an image should be. Exposure variations can create either unexpected beauty or an imperceptible blur. Variability can give a ‘normal’ composition a pleasing surreal quality, or just junk.
Additionally in this gallery, I placed images that I shot using a digital SLR with an R72 filter over the lens. The R72 filter blocks most visible light below the 720 nanometer wavelength and allows more near-infrared (NIR) and infrared (IR) light to strike the camera’s image sensor. This gives us a chance to see the unseen. Foliage glows brightly while concrete and steel, which reflect less infrared light, assume darker tones. The photographer can adjust the color palette of the image post-production for a general cold indigo, warm blue-green, or copper patina appearance. In any case, the image looks very different from those created by the ‘white’ visible light that our eyes see.
I’m not sure what I will try next. Whatever it may be, I’m sure that I can do it without technology getting in the way or making decisions for me.
I am certainly no Ed Hopper, but I am finding that my narrow focus on military subjects, particularly Navy ones, is starting to feel a bit ordinary. Living in a Navy fleet concentration area, there are many military and industrial subjects to photograph, so I try to capture them in a different way.
Many digital photographers are well acquainted with software, like Adobe Photoshop, to manipulate image color, hue, sharpness, and exposure to some degree, but it can also radically change the image until it bears no resemblance to the original photograph. Artistically there is nothing wrong with this, but to me “re-photographing” digital images in this manner is more akin to the montages that I made in kindergarten with white glue and pictures cut from old Sears or Eaton’s catalogs.
I retired the Monochrome and Infrared galleries today and, in their place, created the Natural FX gallery. This is where I can place strange or unusual photographs that I made in a more traditional way. A couple of weeks ago, I took my 35 mm pinhole camera out of the closet, loaded it with a roll of Fuji Velvia 100 slide film, grabbed my tripod and light meter, and trekked out to the Bremerton waterfront.
Photographs made with a pinhole camera have a soft, ethereal quality that is hard to match with a standard lens. The camera, a teakwood box in this case, has been fitted with a thin piece of brass bored with a very small hole where the lens should be. I’m not sure of its size, but the hole is about one-hundredth of an inch in diameter. In 35 mm terms, that would be an aperture of about f/138. In broad daylight, an exposure on 100 ISO film takes about three or four seconds, hence the need for a sturdy tripod.
You never know what you will get with a pinhole camera. Sometimes it is hard to keep the camera stable on the tripod during the very manual exposure. The shutter is my fingertip. Inadvertent double exposures are common. Sometimes if the light is low, there is a significant shift away from the expected “normal” in color or hue of the finished image. Sometimes this failure of the Reciprocity Law leaves only a dark space on the film where an image should be. Exposure variations can create either unexpected beauty or an imperceptible blur. Variability can give a ‘normal’ composition a pleasing surreal quality, or just junk.
Additionally in this gallery, I placed images that I shot using a digital SLR with an R72 filter over the lens. The R72 filter blocks most visible light below the 720 nanometer wavelength and allows more near-infrared (NIR) and infrared (IR) light to strike the camera’s image sensor. This gives us a chance to see the unseen. Foliage glows brightly while concrete and steel, which reflect less infrared light, assume darker tones. The photographer can adjust the color palette of the image post-production for a general cold indigo, warm blue-green, or copper patina appearance. In any case, the image looks very different from those created by the ‘white’ visible light that our eyes see.
I’m not sure what I will try next. Whatever it may be, I’m sure that I can do it without technology getting in the way or making decisions for me.
Infrared Anyone?
Following a good suggestion, I decided to add a new gallery to VoV. The images come from a Fuji Finepix S2 Pro digital SLR. I bought this camera a few years ago thinking that I would instantly fall in love with digital photography. Although it is more convenient and much faster than traditional film photography, I seem to revert to the older, yet more familiar, technology. By attaching an R72 filter to the lens, I found that I can get surreal false color images from light recorded in the near infrared spectrum, that is from wavelengths of 720 nanometers or longer. The composition of these images is not my best, but I like how the camera’s CCD sensor interprets the color of full foliage and non-living subjects. Trees and grass appear as snowy masses tinted blue or light purple while steel and concrete appear in copper or blue-grey tones. Of course the images can also be monochrome, but sometimes the unusual colors of digital infrared images are more intriguing.
