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Infrared Q and A

start out with one by Memories by Eliza Jack. How do you decide when you want to shoot infrared? Is it just based on what is in the scene or based on the look you want? Well, certainly is a very unique look. So I would say that that in terms of those options, it's I'm going for that looks specifically. Usually it's for either the dramatic sky to foliage ratio of a landscape or its this soft skin tone of a portrait, especially people with dark skin tone. Because you're actually getting light, you're able to shape, light and see more detail in someone with dark skin tone. You'll notice a whole Siri's that I mentioned Vinson for Sochi has shot in India, which is just these beautiful portrait, because he can shoot in very low light situations and get a huge amount of detail within his within his portrait. So I'd say it's the look. I'm going for the drama. This is Las Vegas just a couple weeks ago, teaching a WPP, I and, um, the cacophony of confusion of looking over at the New York hotel. ...

I just love it. I love the contrast in terms off our sky versus this really unique a palm tree. This was taken again with the converted. Gee, 15 here. Um, but the thing that I like about the infrared in terms of when do I use it? I have it especially why I, like I'm having a small converted version of infrared is I literally can't have it with me. Like I said, I always have a fanny pack or a bum bag with me and that allows me to have Maybe a GoPro for a fisheye allows me to have something like this. I may have something like I was mentioning yesterday, even something like they appointed shoot camera like the Olympus TG Siri's, which has this ridiculous macro, a one centimeter wide angle macro. So I can actually have three or four cameras in a fanny pack that allow me to do stuff that I can't do with a more traditional SLR in terms of creative photography infrared, I'd say it's almost always gonna be one of the things in the bag, because I know I can always get a shot, especially in the middle of the day, going back to the question this any time I'm going out if I'm doing photography while traveling, you know, down the streets of some town, some city in parade is always gonna be there because of how it is so forgiving in different scenarios. Aiken capture something that's very unique. This is in Hamburg. Um, it's very unique just by the nature of how I can shape light with that. So it's a wonderful travel camera. It's always with May use it extensively in the middle of the day where normally I would have very poor light from traditional full color photography. And I'm also going to be using it for those landscapes or portrait's where I'm gonna exaggerate that tonality of the scene jack online. There's a lot of questions right now about how to actually convert a camera to infrared Who does that, and you may be planning on covering this later in your talk, but there's a lot of questions about that now and then. There's questions, too, about which camera you know, if you if you can afford one camera to convert to infrared Um, what do you prefer? Okay, good questions here. I'm gonna give you a link right here. That goes to a specific page for who I like to use for infrared conversion. Not an ad for them. But, um, actually, it isn't it. I don't mind recommending them all. This is the folks over at life, pixel dot com, life pixel dot com and tiny u r l dot com slash Davis ir takes you to the page where they go into the conversion of infrared and specifically what cameras to convert. So we are going to be touching that. We're gonna do that primarily after the break in terms of what camera that I would recommend will be looking at the samples of, um, different types of conversion not only different cameras, but different options you have in terms of what basically, piece of glass they put in, what filter they literally put inside the camera. So we'll get into after the break. We're gonna get into some of the technology of that. We'll talk about near versus far spectrum of the infrared. Really? What's going on with infrared? So yeah, film to as well, Jack, we're not gonna be touching really unfelt. I mean, I'll mention Maura about the differences between digital and traditional film based infrared perfect one. There's really nobody making infrared film anymore, right? You can't. You can't even buy it. Even if you were able to get it, it's much more fragile. As I mentioned, it's very temperature sensitive. You couldn't You would not take it through that, say, the X ray machines at an airport. It's gonna ghost up really quick with that portion of the spectrum being bombarded unless you were ableto put in the lead container. Um, so And, of course, the thing with traditional infrared if you're using traditional film infrared is you are shooting through a black piece of glass so you can't focus, see or composed, and you have very long exposure times. So, um, though that being said, a lot of people are still doing traditional film photography because they're basically massacre ists, right? Some people actually like pain. No, no being procedures. Now, actually, um, traditional film photography has all sorts of different looks to it. It has the benefit. If you're doing your own developing and printing, especially of black and white, it's beautiful. I highly recommend anybody who's getting into photography. Take a class in traditional film photography, roll your own film, shoot your own film develop and print your own film because that really is. There's a tactile of visceral, kinesthetic aspect of pulling your own prints out of the the chemicals and seeing it, you know, develop. It's wonderful. That's how I learned back in. Yearbooks happen in high school back in the seventies. So that's where I got the bug. So I love it that that is one problem with traditional photography or those of us who are being weaned on our IPhones and even the point and clicks. Is it so quote unquote easy to get a in focus, sharp, colorful, correctly exposed image that we've for gotten the all the craftsmanship that excuse me, that goes into traditional photography and and what's actually going on with these miraculously computers? Supercomputers that are taking the pictures for us, So I love traditional film photography. I still think there's benefits. My son on my daughter, my daughter even more so loves traditional film photography is shooting film just because of these looks that you can get, especially with some of the cheaper cameras that the whole goes and the little plastic lens ones have great look that basically were imitating with our instagrams and our hips, dramatics and everything else were imitating these old film types and old lens types. So I've got nothing but, uh, warm, fuzzy feelings for film. That being said, am I glad that I don't shoot film every single time I go out in the field with that? You know, Fanny Pack that's got 10 cameras that allows me to shoot the universe in ways that you know, you could never shoot in film? Heck, yeah. And also for people, for students who are learning benefit as much as it's wonderful to learn. Traditional film is part of the learning process. Obviously that what is gonna happen when I change my F stop to change a shallow depth of field, click and wait a week to get it back from the lab and, you know, get a contact sheet so I know which ones to print. And then I go, What was my settings? You know that I used digital because every single image not only allows you to shoot it instantaneously, see the result, see the hissed a gram and see every setting that was used to take that picture is an amazing tool for learning tradition. for learning photography. So I think you're learning. Curve on photography with Digital is exponential in terms of traditional film photography. That being said, I think anybody who's going to go into photography is passionate about it should be taking a traditional film class so they get in the darkroom. Great, Perfect. I just want folks on the Internet. No, we may be having a little issues with this link, but we will definitely double check it at the break and make sure we send you to the right place. And I think I have a question from Thomas correct and that in terms of the link, you know, if some people are putting in spaces, I put in a little bit of Kernan attracted a little bit. There are no spaces in any u R l anywhere. So if a person is putting in spaces, that's my fault for confused. I just wanted to tiny u R l is a great one because it takes you are all that are long sold double check that and make sure it's working for I think that. But you're talking about the instant gratification of digital photography you get to see and know you got it or not. Back when you were showing the young lady that you were talking about the tones of her, you could see there was a catch. Lights in the eyes. I don't know if you zoom in on that or it's just natural catch lights from surrounding right. There might have been a little fill flash going on in that particular one, and therefore that would have in terms of cheating. We're talking about the softening of the skin that can help with dramatic light. So I noticed that as well that catch light. So there may have been something going on. Most of it, if you look at the portrait that I'm shooting are not gonna have that just cause I don't use that whole strobe thing, you know, I really love natural light. But I did notice that as well as you were showing that this is was Seattle a couple days ago at the gasworks apart. And so this is We were very fortunate in that we had this sort of work by having the subtle differences between on CPS and scions of cools and warms. I'm gonna be able to go into light room and say, I want those, um, cps the gold to go much darker. I can take that as dark as I want because it's separate from the cools on the foliage. If I were to have shot this with a camera converted for just pure black and white than any lights that were cool versus lights that are warm, I couldn't differentiate between one. I can't take the cools, enlighten them and the warms and dark in them. So I always want some kind of color of possible in, and I are conversion, and you'll see that once we optimize the images. Yes. Another question. Well, I'm curious. Do you have a, uh, uh, method for converting on IPhone because you were talking about the wonders of the IPhone a lot yesterday? Yeah, I'm looking at these. And thinking would be cool to get a vertical, uh, panorama with the IPhone in infrared. Infrared. Wouldn't that be cool? You greedy? Yeah. Yeah. No, actually, I probably myself into it. Jones, My one of my partners in crime probably shot one of the first IPhone infrared pictures ever back in the day. Probably with IPhone four or even prior to that. But that is there's really no way to convert it. The last thing you'd want to do is crack open something where your sensor set up is literally microscopic. And try and figure out how to do that. There is a hot mirror. There is an infrared inhibitor built into most cell phones, so they get the highest quality. So, theoretically, you could take that off with some microscopic tweezer and do that sort of conversion when it would be permanent. And so you'd never be able to shoot any other shot non infrared. So that probably is not what you would do to it, you know? But I've got old IPhones. You could try it. The problem is in the way I did shoot. It was adding, just putting an 89 b in front of it. Put using a tripod in doing a long exposure and in the middle of the day so you can shoot infrared. It does have that inhibitor built into it, so you're basically you're fighting against it. You're not going to get the quality of a traditional infrared on any digital camera simply by putting an infrared, you know, lens on it. And even though it may give you long exposures and everything else because your cameras got unless you customize that it has this hot mirror in it that's taking out the infrared spectrum. You have a filter that's allowing only the infrared in, and they just fight against. He got each other quality is just not gonna be there kind of like shooting infrared underwater. Um, the, uh, by going underwater. Most of the infrared is being reflected from the top of the surface, and you can shoot infrared underwater. But it's really long shutter speeds because so little light is there. So there are certain things where infrared just doesn't, you know, doesn't have the benefit that is inherent in, um, it doesn't it doesn't accentuate the technology. So I would not convert an IPhone. Probably that's that I do have an old IPhone mentioned travel again around Europe. I just love it for monochromatic. One aspect will touch down. We will talk about the technology that's actually is exciting is the, um the monochromatic a latitude that you have an improvement. Infrared is greater than visible light. In other words, what you can grab in a single shot because these cameras, even though they're converted for infrared, they're seeing more than infrared. They are seeing visible light as well. This infrared cut off filter that is part of the cameras is allowing visible light and infrared light to go through. So we are seeing it's not purely invisible world. So by combining visible light and the infrared portion of the spectrum, removing that infrared and Hibbert that actually is cutting off a large portion of the dynamic range of your images, it improves the quality of the image because infrared light does kind of tested what we consider degrade the image. But you actually get a greater dynamic range in a single shot in infrared than you would in full color. In terms of a monochromatic, you were shooting black and white that the range that trying to get the number of tones available to you in infrared in a single exposure is greater. Which means that especially in the middle of the day I mentioned before this, one of the great things that I love about infrared is this ability to shoot in the middle of the day and not get plugged up shadows or clipped highlights. So you're get these beautiful, dramatic, monochromatic images that have a full spectrum to, and they almost because of how light is bouncing off things like this church in Germany. It's almost like a built in hdr kind of look to it, because it has such a great dynamic range and on how it accentuates edges again. It's almost like it's got a built in clarity filter inside of it just straight out of the camera. So I just I love it in terms of how it does a monochromatic work. Um, not only because of the look, but it actually is capturing a greater dynamic range in a single shot than what you would get in visible light. Even with converting to black and white, you're giving yourself a dramatically greater length of frequencies of light at your disposal by adding the infrared portion to your work. Maroon Bells If you've ever been here, um, Sunrise to be able to look into your shadows as well as maintain highlight detail, I just again that's beautiful for landscapes. Absolutely love it. Let's see what even you know, little street photography. Later, it's a straight out of the camera in Paris. But all right, probably Germany. More German than it looks like French. Yes, when you're when you're talking, you're getting a higher reflectivity out of the foliage. But with rocks, you're gonna get somewhat, but not nearly as much. Well, there's heat coming off too many point. What time of the day you're shooting, So he is an element of it. And so rocks can be, if they're probably say, it's probably more related to the heat coming off the radiation coming off the rocks, which is going to determine whether they're going to come up as being lit. I mean, here's the middle of the day down in Brazil, and here are rocks are similar in terms of the tonal range as the foliage in the background. Where is the water in the skies going dark? Um, at another time of day. It could be that the rocks just are radiating. That is a very interesting aspect of it, because there is. Even though cameras that are converted for infrared are what are known as the near portion of the infrared spectrum. They're not thermal, they're not, you know, nighttime goggles, which is the far portion of the spectrum much greater. And actually a true thermal imaging sensor for far infrared has to be refrigerated because it will pick up the ambient heat around it. So when you're doing Astro photography and you've got the Hubble that's gonna shoot that, that infrared shot is gonna be actually coming from a refrigerated sensor, the military ones that are you know, the goggles that you use are actually throwing out infrared light toe pick up infrared invisible light. You can't see it like your little clicker on your TV remote control. You notice when you do that, you're actually sending out in visible light in that spectrum. That's what ah goggle would do that does nighttime vision but the thermal ones. Why it's such a elaborate configuration is because true far infrared capture is so sensitive to thermal that you actually have to refrigerate the sense or do some special jiggery pokery to protect it. I just recently down toe Alabama Hills and Lone Pine. You're thinking how that would turn out infrared. Any play. I mean, here's uninterested. This is just grapes again, straight out of the camera. These are the sorts of things that will dio when we do optimizing of infrared shots. Thats afternoon straight out of the camera and you can see this reflectivity of what would be almost a virtually black great leaf and this lime green grape right next to it and this glowing nature that you're getting You can see that this is obviously dramatic. Sidel it right. You can see the shadow that's going on here. And yet you can see all the shadow detail throughout everything in this scene, which was virtually pure black when it was taken dramatically side lit. So this, um, nature of light radiating this portion of the spectrum radiating from objects gives you this very, very unique look to it. Um, well, I find another again, I'll do a little hand tinting of this. I just love it for monochromatic. And I also do love the hand tinting that one actually is the color from it. I just took out everything but the purple, so actually used the inherent color in the infrared and just removed the the warms in the file. And you have latitude, as you were going to see, and we get into adobe camera, raw and light room to shift color. You can shift, you know, yellow to either orange or red so you can shift blue toe, purple or Scion. You can shift the CBS and Scion slightly, but you can't flip it completely. That's why we're actually gonna be going into photo shop. When we want to convert the yellow skies into blue, we're gonna have to do a couple of different techniques to swap that completely. Okay. Was there any other questions out in the, um, studio? Yeah. We have a few people asking about color color, white balancing, Yes, in dealing with infrared can. You were going to do that? Actually, we're gonna bring in a plan, and we're gonna do a custom white balance. Okay on that. Basically, the concept is is that you will take your camera. However, it's done some cameras. You take a picture of what you want to be the neutral color. In this case, it's usually going to be a bright green grass or some sort of foliage. You take a picture of it and you tell it to use that as a reference. The nice thing about that is it stays in the camera and that picture is used as the reference horse. Other cameras, you literally just point at it and then you say, sample or or read or capture or whatever, and it just takes a sample from that. But basically you pointed bright green grass or some sort of green village, and you say, Make that neutral and that's what's going toe. Take out the red cast. The main thing that we're gonna find this The challenge with infrared is that if you're shooting in the raw file format, um, and then bring it into light room in a CR, which is our favorite spot for tweaking our files. Adobe never anticipated when they created those raw converters that people do this. We're psychotic photography notice Imprint on the temperature, the physical degrees Kelvin of the measurement of white balance doesn't go over far enough to correct most infrared shots inside of light room where adobe camera raw. Now there's some tweets you can do. You can create some custom profiles that will work in light room so you can get it closer to what you saw in the back of the camera. The camera, obviously, maybe not so obviously. But the camera manufacturers have bring brought in a greater range for that white balance. So the degrees kelvin, the physically how white balance is measured is in heat allows a greater dynamic range in the camera. That's what we can white balance in the camera, and you'd see something like this on the back of camera. The problem is, when you bring those in as raw into most converters, it can't get the same image. So you could dio 500 steps to try and get that back. Or you could use the software that comes. I'll be, since I'm a Nikon shooter will be bringing capture in X two up to show you that what you see on the back of the camera and whether you shoot raw or J. Peg, they all look exactly the same so you can get, you know, beautiful, um, white balance done by using the software that came with your camera. Or you can shoot in J. Peg. As we all know, professional photographers. That's against the law to shoot in J. Peg with your big boy Big girl camera, right? You put on your big boy panties and stop shooting J. Peg. Unless, of course, you know how to set your cameras that your your settings in your camera by doing things like turning your sharpening way down or off, doing a few other things related to your color space. One of the things that I'm gonna do is give you permission to shoot J. Peg when you're shooting infrared and get exactly what you saw in the back of the camera with the beautiful white balance. And use that as the starting point for the tweaking of your images. And that just drives some people absolutely eight crazy by that thought. But for me, as opposed to bring it into another converter like capture in X two, which is a nice converter, my workflow is all geared toward, um, a CR and light room. And what I'm able to get the microscopic differences between the raw file and me, making sure that I have the correct dynamic range and explosion everything in my camera so that that my J pegs are gorgeous. Still giving me the latitude to fine tune it inside of light room in a CR is typically how I go and that's good. I'm I know I'm gonna lose some converts right there because the thought of gives them the creeps of shooting a J. Peg as a professional photographer. But that is one of the solutions to get beautiful this again. This sort of coloring directly out of the camera is because I can set that white balance in the camera, maintain it through my entire workflow because I'm actually allowing that white balance to be cooked in the camera. A supposed to needing to cook it in a raw converter, but we'll be showing how far you can push it, and I'll show you some simple ways had of going into a searing light room, had a push it and customized that white balance. If you do want to do it on, you can do it. And we'll be talking about methods for doing what would be the lighting set up to do an in studio infrared shot. I've only I've only ever done natural light. That's a good question. I'm now really the studio shooter. There's not. It's not like I would go in and get infrared lights, though they are available. Basically, any security camera that takes advantage of um um, looking in the dark, you can get infrared sets of lights and I have heard about people doing that. Teoh augment the visible light with infrared light. But like I said, for if you're in studio, we're talking about portrait in portrait. The light is actually gonna be coming from. In a sense, the skin or the element of thermal aspect of the portrait will be coming from the person themselves. So I don't know. I would say that you're going to light it in a traditional fashion, depending upon what you're looking for. You theoretically could, you know, shoot dramatic lighting, rim lighting, side lighting. Actually, try and shape a harsh shadow toe light scenario on a figure or portrait. You would, by definition, beginning some of that tonal range of the infrared you would have liked coming from the shadow side. So even without a bounce, a reflector or some sort of, you know, kicker light to help with your shadow, you would be getting some natural effective that just by the definition of using infrared, but so I don't know, it really would be something about how you shoot what sort of studio photography you dio to, um, help shape what you would do, so I would say just you would use it traditionally, you would instantly, as soon as you took a test shot, you would see what would be taking place in terms of how the skin is reacting to it. That also relates also to the ethnicity of the person. Ah, person who's already got really light skin can look well, we'll get here when we talk about the technology. Um, yesterday you saw one of my models, which I was shooting was a wonderful young lady named Dakota and Dakota in infrared. Very light skin almost is ghostly in terms of her look. And whether that's a feature or a bug, um, is it would depend upon what you're doing. You know, you she's got a lot of SAS. So I loved going on, and you can get You'll also notice why I do a lot of that high key. You'll notice on those other portrait's with people who have inherently more lighter skin. Why I go for that high key, cause this I still have the drama in them, but we've got this overall light, so that's why I go in terms of my high. Keep processing of people with light skin I exaggerate that. That's the story. So I'm gonna push that cause that's my middle name. So yeah. Yes. Question. What if you have a model who is light skinned but has a lot of dark freckles? Is there a way to pull that out of the well, The nice thing about freckles. Freckles are basically, you know, in the red portion of the spectrum, and it will minimize. That is one of the things that is nice by about infrared in general. Is that you? The freckles will either disappear or be minimized. You won't get the exaggerated tonality of red versus light or Rose Atia or even razor burn or just, you know, whatever is going on with skin. None of us have consistent skin tone as one of things that we were doing traditional skin, you know, retouching and excuse me like rumor. Photoshopped. We talk about that. But infrared, even if you have a little bit of acne or things like that, is very forgiving because the red is kind of disappearing as part of what's being grabbed. That portion of the spectrum. So I would say that it's a nice feature, not a bug. The fact that it's lightning irregularities and skin tone. And again, freckles, acne, razor burn, Rose, Atia. All those sorts of things are minimized with a Nen Fred portrait. But again, whether that gives you, you can again. Here's my lovely daughter and untwist it right out of the camera shot. It's almost a plastic skin. It's a waxy look to it, which again I love. But it's a very unique look that would depend upon your client and whether they see that as a feature or whether it looks like I said, wax your plastic, I love it just because it's a very unique look to it. But that is also why I kind of exaggerated in terms of my processing as we'll see this afternoon is I'm gonna take that. I'm gonna push that a little bit further rather than make it look like a full color image. No, I've got I'm gonna shoot full color. I'll shoot full color. I'm gonna shoot in front. I should infer it. I purposely emphasized my processing to take advantage of whatever I'm shooting so infrared I'm gonna process differently, And that's why we'll spend the afternoon talking about ways of processing infrared photography. Any other questions out ending? Okay, Yes, I just flashed, Wondering if you'd ever done an infrared wedding shoot. I haven't because weddings usually consist of people, and I don't do people like and they certainly don't like clients. And I certainly don't like mothers in laws and other. I love my mother in law. Thank you. You get sneaker. But it is. It's wonderful. And as a matter of fact, I would highly recommend it, at least for those wonderful lawn shots where you have, you know, the bride and groom One, as I mentioned, you get greater dynamic range. So from the bride's dress to the groom's tuxedo, you instantly are able to grab mawr without the risk of blowing out or plugging up detail. But, um, no bride doesn't like the, you know, fairy land. Feel oven infrared on the beautiful green lawn or whatever you're doing. You instantly get fairy landed your wedding, maybe in a parking lot, but you throw, you know, and employed as an option and all of a sudden chicken skin again. All of a sudden you can get this. No, just magnificent. Look, because you went in the parking lot and found a tree. And now here's This happens to be the Galapagos, but a zone example. You can see this backlit tree, and just because of how it's grabbing the light, that tree is black because it's backlit. I'm looking right into it. Well, it's white because it's in print. So you add a couple into that scenario, and all of a sudden you're able to frame going back to our composition of how toe to shoot compose a. Seen by the fact that you've got this beautiful ability to do these white shimmering, you know, staying glass backdrop simply by Putting somebody in front foliage is wonderful. So I there's no reason why a wedding shooter would not at least have some sort of minimal camera for shooting those landscape scenes of the, uh, couple or the bride in the context of a garden on having him. Fred is an option. Would I shoot an entire wedding in infrared? Probably not, because you're tryingto wedding is this combination of expressive capture, artistic capture and documentation when you should infrared Nobody saw the wedding. That way. You shoot the entire wedding in freight here, we're gonna go. That's really cool, but I don't even know what planet you're on, let alone. You know that that was on a Thursday with this wonderful bride of, you know, Bill in Susie. Whatever. Yes, I have seen where they're doing. Outdoor shot with a cup couple in a gazebo and the white of the gazebo, plus the foliage. Turning white actually was pretty spectacular, but it was just minimally inserted into the wedding album. Yeah, and that's another thing. If you have your infrared converted to black and white rather than leaving the subtle colors, then it doesn't. People are used to seeing black and white shots within a wedding album, so it doesn't shout infrared or special effect or things like that. So I that would be one case where oftentimes infrared inside, where they're used as a portion of a story a Siri's. That's why my serious from TD will have ah, lot of shots from there. I had everything monochromatic everything. One set CP atones for the entire Siri's color infrared underwater. Everything had a similar look to unify that story, which was the island of Moria. So I would do that and probably I would not be exaggerating the coloring of infrared. In that case, just because that would be, you know, jumping around within a wedding album, I would do it more traditional black and white good questions.