Spent an hour today shooting photos just for fun with my infra-red camera. Everyone from the Quad Cities knows the McClellan Heights district in Davenport as having astoundingly beautiful homes nested in a park-like setting. Many of my commercial and wedding clients live in this area. I have a few friends who live there currently (one of them lives in one of the homes in this gallery) and many old friends who grew up in this district. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know that some of these houses have brain surgeons living in them!
On the technical side of things…My camera is an older pro digital that I sent to Australia to be retrofitted to see only “near infra-red” light. This light frequency is just below what the human eye can see. Direct sunlight emitted on to foliage causes the chlorophyll contained in that foliage to reflect a great deal of infra-red thereby causing leave and grass to blow out to white. Clear blue skies reflect very little infrared and therefore tend towards black. This type of photography only works well with direct sunlight.
Infrared photography has been available for about 100 years. There is a heavy grain to the film not to mention long exposures requiring a tripod. My camera allows me to shoot hand held. The average exposure setting for these images are about ISO 400, 1/100 sec, f/10. Stay tuned for more shots in the near future.
Don’t forget to visit my infra-red photography pages to see more.