As an early adopter of digital imaging, I have had the opportunity to explore and write about the transition from film to digital. It’s been an impressive technological march.  In 2000, I wrote and illustrated a story for Lexar Media on the possibilities of simulating the look of Infrared film images using digital cameras. That article and the use of a variety of infrared filters is posted on this site under TIPS.   At the time, I concluded that it was a lot of work for a pretty interesting result but not particularly predictable.  “Predictable” is a key word in professional photography as you are promising your clients that you will deliver. So I recently acquired a Nikon D40x which I had converted to infrared imaging by Lifepixel.com.  It’s predictable and cool and compared to the earlier “filter technique” easy to use.

I am not a physicist but Infrared Photography is photography using light in the invisible spectrum of the Electro Magnetic Spectrum so I am lead to believe that Infrared photography is stimulating the film or in the case of digital, the sensor, by recording the energy it emanates.  That energy is supposedly not visible to the human eye so…and this is where I get confused…., you can make pictures of it?  Anyway, lets leave the physics and get on to the rectangles.

Colors drop out and change and become quite striking when this technique is used and so I am going to be running a series of posts on the new camera I bought which is “Infrared.”  A nice tool to add to the arsenal.  The first day out, I took a series of images using a LENSBABY to simulate the shimmering look of infrared.  I have posted those results at the Image Library and will continue to update you on results.   I believe the “look” is impressive and different enough that it was be successful and am looking forward to making some large test prints.   In the meantime, you might look at Lifepixel.com for more information…