What you should know befor taking
digital Infrared Pictures

You want to know something about digital infrared photography?

Okay, so lets start with the most important lesson. Forget about color images when we talk about shooting infrared. Recorded infrared images wont appear in beautiful colors on your monitor at home after your first outing.

First of all you should use a Digital Camera which is able to record Infrared light between 700nm and 1000nm wavelength.

Which cameras are suitable for this application?

If you own one of these cameras you can start the exiting experiment of Infrared Photography. But take care, not every camera will be able to record infrared color pictures. Even if this sounds funny to a beginner you should know that most of the professionals prefer false color infrared shots instead of black&white ones. This is interesting considering that the unprocessed recorded image is just monochrom pink or grayish.

What do you need to buy now to start photographing in infrared?

First you need only 1 Filter the standard 18-70mm set lens, and a tripod. The Hoya R72 Infrared Filter, which I recommend to you for the beginning is nearly opaque and should cut most of the visible range of light. This Hoya R72 infrared filter is quite expensive but produces great results. If you use another type, like the B+W 093 you might be sad because it records only black&white pics only. Befor buying the filter you should think first which lens will be your first choice, then check the diameter from this lens and buy the filter in this size (52mm or so).

If you own a Nikon DSLR like the D50 or the D70s and you have the Nikkor 18-70mm you need to buy this filter in 67mm diameter or even better in 72 or 77mm and use it with a step up ring. This will give you the ability to use it later on nearly every nikon lens. The tripod can be small, or large, light or heavy, in true it doesnt matter if there is not to much wind and you use the selftimer.

The next part of the learning process demands a lot of frusttraiting attempts, the postprocessing from the picture in photoshop. If the white balance wasnt set properly befor the shooting, or the sky wasnt that blue the results must be disapointing and will apear just black and white on your monitor screen.

This is the first stage of IR Photography which anyone has to go through, so dont give up if you just evaluate the first pictures and feel unhappy with the results. No one starts like a pro, its along hard way if you want to succeed in Infrared or even worse in UV photography.

With next step you will learn to understand that not every kind of lens is suitable for Infrared. This sounds funny but its a fact. Most of the new designed DX Nikkor lens and also many Autofokus lens just cant be used, because hot spots and/or unsharpness will occur. Interestingly there is no real correlation between the quality or the age of a lens and their capability in infrared. Some old lens like the Nikkor Ai 28mm f/3.5 are real great performers in IR while younger ones from the 28mm family are tremendous performer.

For example:

The new Nikkor AF-S VR DX 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED lens is one of the best performers in Infrared using the Hoya R72 filter when shooting at 18mm! No hot spots occur and all apertures above f/8.0 will provide good results.

Here you can view an example of a false color infrared image made with the VR 18-200mm lens plus the Hoya R72 filter on a sturdy gitzo carbon tripod.

If you like the image I would recommend you to buy an Hoya R72 filter and try to make the first IR-Pics by yourself. Because there is not so much to say about infrared I will stop now with this crash course and wait until you guys have some questions. This is a blog and everyone is invited to ask me all the question he might have, even if they seem to be nonrelevant.

Cheers,

Wolfgang