Interesting Web Sites of a Subluminary Nature

Once you have exhausted the delights that Invisible Light has to offer ... and bought yourself a few prints to grace the walls of the baronial hall ... here are some other web sites that I've found or been told about. From here you can extend your journey with the help of other photographers and, down the page, some more technical resources on the subject.
[Updated April 2008]

Link of the moment: Infrared digital conversions

• The established American infrared emporia, MaxMax and LifePixel, now have European competition in the shape of ACS, Advanced Camera Services of Norfolk in England. All three sites offer useful information and conversion services, and MaxMax and ACS also sell ready-converted cameras. The arrival of ACS means that European infrared photographers now have somewhere within the EU who can undertake modifications, which avoids customs duties. Please note that I have no personal experience of any of these companies (but I'd appreciate hearing of your experiences) so these links are not endorsements. If you know of other people doing such conversions please let me know.

First ... some photographers

• I have always had a secret yearning to use a panoramic camera. I was tempted by the X-Pan until I noticed the infrared film sensor and I'm one of those people who likes the challenge of framing for a wider viewpoint. Francisco J Marin combines a great eye for the widescreen with infrared film (as well as colour). You can find your way to his often immersive wide shots—taken with cameras like the X-Pan (I was wrong evidently) and Noblex—from his home page. I've linked to the English version, but the original is in Spanish and there is a German version as well.
• There are two good reasons for visiting Bjørn Rørslett's site. The first is his collection of fascinating IR and UV (and sometime both together!) images and the second is his super-comprehensive reviews of Nikkor lenses. He's a nature photographer and seems to be a regular user of that Fuji UVIR digital camera. His lens reviews often comment on IR and UV performance, which makes it interesting (essential even) reading for us subluminalists. The only down side is that the site doesn't seem to be very active at the moment ... but look who's talking!
• I had always thought that it was Canon's sensor that gave those orange skies when you shot infrared. It seems I am wrong since Greg Burns has been putting his Nikon D70 to good use with a #87 filter and getting some quite stunning results. He's not afraid to get the occasional lens flare either. Click on the word infrared ... but you'd already guessed that hadn't you?
• I've been remiss in not adding Andy Smith's Visual Realia to the list. There are a lot of infrared digital shots on his site ... but you have to search on 'infrared' or find the infrared theme to get there. It's a little effort but worth it. What stopped me in my tracks was a quote from Doctor Who which says "There are worlds out there where the skies are burning, where the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song." Above the quote is a time-exposure of a dreaming river. So the Good Doctor had seen infrared photos had he? (I know Tom Baker has ... was it him?)
• Two for the price of one with this entry. I stumbled across xRez's super-hi resolution panoramas of Zion Canyon in Utah and saw that they used a Canon digital 'back' (as they put it) to shoot in near-infrared. It being a Canon you get some pseudo-colour artefacts as well. This is multi-mega-pixel stuff and they have utilised the Google Maps technology to allow panning and zooming. around an amazing infrared panorama. There is also a link to Travis Price's little slice of Blogspot (he's one of the xRez team) where you can see his excellent digital IR shots of Zion as well. But that panorama will blow your mind ... especially if you have lots of pixels at your disposal.
• Gary Brown hails from Phoenix, Arizona and, as he puts it, has an IR environment quite different from mine. He has a nice eye for landscapes, and if you look through the galleries you'll find infrared shots in many of the photo sets ... not just the ones labeled infrared.
• It was really nice to get an email from Kevan Brewer (who has a great site of photos of the New Forest) recommending Kathy Harcom's website. She only shoots black and white, often using Kodak HIE film, and often toned and hand coloured. Kathy is a Fellow of the RPS and the quality of her work makes this a great site to visit. I love the composition of her shots and for me the real problem is going to be how to learn from her eye without slavishly copying.
• Charles Baynon lives in Ludlow in Shropshire, an incredibly picturesque English county and a town which was once the seat of government for the Marches and Wales. He uses Kodak infrared film, scans the negs and inkjet prints them in limited editions ... then sells them on his web site and direct to the public on a stall in Ludlow Market, right by the castle. I'm knocked out by his landscapes, especially since he takes the kind of images I do ... and does it very well indeed.
• Pere Villez has an interesting past. He used to operate a computer back in the days when the men (rarely women) who operated them wore white coats and the machines themselves lived in air-conditioned caves where the sun never shone but the light never faded. Pere is now a senior lecturer at Portsmouth University but his web site includes some great digital infrared architectural photography around Barcelona (I assume his home town) which has always been the place where aliens try out their architectural genius on us humans. A faster route to his amazing photos - taken with an unmodified Dimage 7 and a Hoya R72 - is at www.centuryofnoise.com.
• Les Paysages Invisibles features the landscapes of Jean-Pierre Tremblay who uses Kodak HIE 35mm and Maco 120 roll film in 6 by 7 format. He's managed to capture some lovely luminous foliage. JP is Québequois and the site is in French: click on Diaporama to see the photos. I think the URL of each photo will give you a clue as to which film you're looking at. In any event, how could you resist images with titles like 'Ruine d'une époque glorieuse' or 'La porte de l'Éden' ... they could be pieces of music by Couperin, Satie or Ravel n'est pas?
• Chuck Korolden ... another Cycloid Fathom alumnus. Chuck's site has moved URL once more and, we hope, should now enter a phase of restful stability. Great shot on the front page ... follow the link to 'Infrared'.
• Eric Cheng has has been experimenting with digital cameras and infrared filters. The link to his infrared photos is on the right. This is where you can find out about the 'bleeding edge' technique of removing the infrared filter from a digital camera.
• Matthew Piunno is the Colorblind Artist (he's American, hence the spelling) and has some wonderfully atmospheric digital IR shots on his site. I believe that he's using a modified Sony F717 which gives some crisp and very subtle pseudo-colour effects.
• I have been meaning to recommend Stan Patz's web site for some time. Stan is a well-established photographer based in New York City with a pretty central Zip. There's more to his site than infrared ... but check out his IR landscapes. He has even managed what, for me, has to be the definitive 'hay bale shot' ... and wide-screen to boot.
• Gavin Wrigley's site is a great source of colour images (for which he is famous) including the results of his trip to the USA. Also includes some black and white photos and a very good infrared backgrounder - almost as good as mine ;-) - certainly better graphics. He has also nabbed the domain infraredphoto.co.uk
• Malcom Fear is a photographer based in the wonderfully photogenic English county of Dorset. He's called his site In'FEAR'ed. As my visit to the place was particularly rainy and overcast I really like his shot of the ruins of Corfe Castle.
• From the whimsically-named Walnut Creek in California we find Wayne Miller. There's lots more besides 'straight' infrared: he's done some really creative and wacky things using IR (amongst other wavelengths).
• You should check out some beautiful and fascinating images by Norman E Riley. Norman's approach to infrared is to use it as one of a number of elements in building the whole look of his images. This means that his photos generally do not exhibit the 'traditional' infrared look. For example, he will choose his filters to balance the influences of all the light falling on his subjects. You used to go to the 'Facts of Light' section first, as well as his technical notes ... but the site has been redesigned and (to be honest) I don't know where you should look. But look you should!
• Galeria Fotografii Roberta Urbañskiego leads to the English version of this site, but there is a Polish one as well. Roberta is anglicised to Robert and he's based in Warsaw. Follow the link to his 'Exhibition' and hence to Landscapes III, which is where you'll find the infrared shots.
• The home page of Joe Paduano (he of The Art of Infrared Photography fame) has moved to its own domain at joepaduano.com.
• Mike Finley, whose website goes by the name of the Efikim Gallery, majors in infrared and plants (especially carnivorous ones). It's nice to see someone with a hobby. His home page includes a really nice panoramic infrared landscape and, if I had to complain, my only complaint would be that there isn't enough of his infrared work on the site. Mike used the Konica film, lives in Cheshire in the southern part of the north-west of England, and recently achieved a Licentiateship of the Royal Photographic Society. (I didn't know what Efikim means ... if you Google it you only reach Mike's pages ... until I looked at the word backwards. I think I get it.)
• Scott Alberts is a sometime member of the Simpsons production team who also takes landscapes in infrared. There are some really stunning shots here, ranging from LA to Bali and Spain taking in obscure bits of the US backwoods in between. He was off-line for a while (or at least I lost track of him) but now he's back and living in Spain. I think Scott has a really good eye for landscapes and his images seem completely suffused with light. Beautiful. Buy one of his prints once you've bought one of mine ;=) There's something wrong with most fo Scott's site ... maybe it's withering on the vine, but you can still explore his IR shots (including Bali) from the link.
• The Handmade Photographic Images of George L Smyth which include some infrared photos; including a long-time favourite of mine called 'House of Dreams'. George is also the originator of The Internet Photographic Handmade Postcard Trading List.
• Antonis Karydis is a Greek photographer who uses colour infrared film for what you might call 'ordinary' photography. Sometimes you wouldn't realise it was infrared except for the information next to the photo. It's the curious and often rich colours that finally give it away. These are photos that would work in 'normal' light: adding the infrared dimension is a bonus for us subluminists.
• Diane Syme, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, USA (it says here) has some really nice shots and, unlike many of us IR-types, she lets people get into her shots too. The shot of people gazing at the city across the water - Minneapolis Dream at Lake Hiawatha - is a gem and one of my all-time-favourite infrared shots.
• John Maclean's colourful Infrared Santa Fe includes some of the best colour infrared around, including a new take on the obligatory graveyard shots.
• Pitan Singhasaneh - Near Infrared
  A Thai site: Pitan Singhasaneh uses a Nikon Coolpix 950 with an 'opaque' filter. He's also into fish-eye and panoramic images as well as the occasional shot of his feet! Worth checking out although you might have to look carefully amongst the Thai characters (especially if you don't have a Thai font) ... but there is some Roman text and it's worth persevering. The link to his gallery is a little way down the right hand side or here. Look out for some stunning flash photos of flowers in Gallery 21. (These links are currently not responding for some reason.)
• Cor Breukel's Infrared Photographs are back on-line. Cor and I like similar kinds of images, and he's a nice guy too. Sad to say, the Infrared Gallery is now closed, Cor set it up and Jason Revell ran it for a while. (This link is also not responding at the moment.)
• Simon Marsden: photographer of ghostly castles and their ilk ... and many books of infrared images without (to my knowledge) ever admitting it.
• Judy, Hugh and Claire Thomas have been working together to produce hybrid visible/infrared light images. If you go to the gallery on their site and select the Infra DIg Portfolio (as they call it) you can find them. They are using different techniques to the ones I used to demonstrate colour mapping and there's an article explaining it all. Very nice.
• Reha Akcakaya is the Turkish photographer who produced the book Journey with the Invisible Light (no relation - but check out the bibliography). This is his web gallery, including some images from that book.
• Onno Zweers, has a site called www.landscapes.nl. The site includes non-IR stuff (still good of course) and is bilingual Dutch/English.
• The Black and White Art Zone was a site run by Elias Eliadis who by day photographs Greek archaeological objects for the Ministry of Culture and by night (or at least at weekends) takes black and white photos. It has now been 'preserved' which makes me wonder what may have happened to Elias, who I met on a visit to Athens many years ago.
• Richard Marin has put together a site with some neat design as well as infrared photos. The sections on 'Things' and 'War' are the places to look and there's a screensaver available with some of his images. I've reviewed his book War of our Fathers in the Book List.
• More great landscapes, including IR, from F Kelly MacKay in Nova Scotia.
• Some particularly stunning IR photos by Bill Agee in California.
• Alan Lindsay Garrett comes right out and calls them Infrared Nudes, and has received a stratospheric number of hits ... are these connected perhaps?
• Professor Ferncase's Infrared Window ... and a very nicely designed one it is too ... although the image size is a bit small by today's epic standards. Actually he doesn't call it the Window any more but it was such a great title I have a one-man campaign to preserve it.
• I'm not sure whether it's called Fine Art Infrared Photography or, more poetically, Infrared Dreams but this site by Chris Maher and Larry Berman includes some great infrared shots taken with digital cameras including nudes and colour.
• Mike Malec, otherwise Raven Photography, is based in Colorado and specialises in landscapes using 35mm and larger formats. He has a good feel for composition and (I'm envious) has some great shots of hot-air balloons.
• I do the occasional 'vanity search' and found another set of infrared pictures under the name Invisible Light. They're shots taken with an infrared flashgun by Jeff Ward. His first page seems to indicate that he didn't like the experience but the shots are great. Not really arty but a useful demonstration of something we sub-luminalists know about but hardly ever do. Mostly images of people boogying on down in a club ... down to below 700 nanometres (!) of course. Oh yeah! A lousy interface ... click on the dull text at the left to see the pics.
• Another digital infrared experimenter is Carl Schofield and he's posted some superb shots taken with a Nikon CoolPix digital camera showing just how good this can be at IR ... if you can tolerate the long exposures.

... then there's the movie

• Wristcutters is a movie shot entirely on Super-16mm colour infrared film. Kodak made the stock specially for the production. It's described as 'An offbeat comedy, a love story, a road movie - but everybody's dead' ... and Tom Waits is in it ... and it went down well at Sundance 2006. I hadn't tried to check the site for a little while but it's now back in action and, via the MySpace links, you can see clips. I have to say it doesn't look very infrared (at least not the extracts I've seen) but it does look quirky, fun and (dare I say) rather good. Since it will never reach the screen of my local Odeon multiplex I'll have to keep an eye out for a PAL DVD or persuade the BBC or Channel 4 to screen it. [You can get the NTSC Region 1 DVD from Amazon.com]

... and now some other infrared resource web sites

• A digital camera designed for infrared work is a rarity, especially at a reasonable price. It's the Fujifilm IS-1 [buy from Amazon.com] and follows on from their similar FinePix S3 Pro UVIR which is now discontinued as the S3 is replaced by the S5. Fuji have now produced a FujiFilm IS Pro [buy from Amazon.com], based on the S5 which is itself based on the Nikon D200 (phew!). The IS-1 works up to 900 nm, which will give full Wood effect and good haze penetration while the IS Pro (a D-SLR) also records some UV. The camera also has image stabilisation. The camera should be available outside the USA as well, with a UK launch supposedly in mid-2007 although it may be limited to appropriate professional users/dealers. For the moment I'll have to stick with my Sony DSC F-828. Sony have now launched a new 8 megapixel camera with both Nightshot and image stabilisation. So if the night shot is still restricted the stabilisation might at least make it a useable IR camera. Info on the Sony site.
• There are some amazing photos on the flickr site and someone has set up a 'Top 20 Infrared Shots' pool. There's a great variety of film and digital; monochrome and various shades of false colour. As I write, there's an amazing shot of a golfer summoning the forces of nature to help his drive ... helped by an infrared image and a touch of Photoshop magic.
• Andrew Davidhazy is Professor of Imaging and Photographic Technology at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York State. He's something of an imaging guru ... including infrared of course. He has written a succinct backgrounder on infrared photography.
• Marco Pauk has produced an extremely comprehensive analysis of the available B&W infrared flm stock. This page is highly recommended if you want to 'lift the hood' on this technique even a little. However ... the exact film tested here may no longer be available.
• The web site of RMIT University in Melbourne University includes an interesting set of biographies of pioneers of 'invisible radiation' photography, including Wood, Clark and Gibson. They're written by Prof Robin Williams and Gigi Williams. More notably there is an academic article on infrared photography, with copious references, which makes an essential adjunct to Clark's book. The article was included in an out-of-print book on Biological Photography (ed Vetter, Publ Focal Press 1992).
• Brian Webb is a space enthusiast and his Space Archive site has an interesting (if brief) technical appraisal of using a digital camera for technical photography, including IR and UV.
• Kodak data sheets on their black and white and colour infrared film.
• On the Apogee Photo site there's a good series of articles by Michael Fulks. You can find them in the archive section of their magazine (click on the table of contents link on the Apogee home page, as the mag's link changes every month). The first article dates from March 1996 and is called Infrared Photography: Debunking Myths which gives advice about getting out there and taking IR photos. His advice about exposure is especially clear, although he didn't seem to read the Kodak data sheet before using the film for the first time. He followed this article with a second part to the article and then one on focussing. Finally (so far) is a look at the Ilford SFX-200 film, with examples.
• Yahoo has a section for infrared photography in the Visual Arts section.
• Willem-Jan Markerink's home page has a wealth of technical data as well as subscription info for the Infrared Mailing List, of which he is Godfather ... or at least Big Brother. The page style is unashamedly 1990s web but don't let that stop you.
• ... and here is an archive of the Infrared mailing list organised by Marco Pauck in Hamburg, Germany. This is the place to go to check out those pesky ir-transparent developing tanks and cameras with infrared film sensors! However, the archive froze in May 2001.
• ... an up-to-date and (currently) active archiving of the group can be found on Nabble.
• The Infrared FAQ has been updated and is now maintained by Clive Warren at CoCam.
• Ed Scott and Hollis Bewley have put together a site on Spectral Selectivity in photography which should get you thinking.

These links are indirected through a Perl script so I can see who is interested in what and eventually I'll be publishing the results of the tracking. If any of them don't work please mail me and complain - nicely of course. Also mail me to suggest new sites (subject to the editor's approval of course).