A couple of weeks ago, I had a discussion about some of my work with a professional photographer and very experienced and knowledgeable printer whom I’ll refer to as “V.” The discussion was regarding a series I’ve been working on of infrared photographs of US and California flags.

V wasn’t very impressed with the work, which is not in itself necessarily interesting. After all, not all work will be to everyone’s taste, and of course not everything I produce is solid gold — far from it. But I found some of the particulars interesting:

He ranked the photographs in order from best or most interesting to worst or least interesting; this ranking was exactly opposite the ranking I would apply to the same photographs. This is a pretty awesome response, because it shows that what interests me in the photographs, the direction I want to take them, corresponds to something that isn’t just in my head — even if it isn’t necessarily something that’s crowd-pleasing.

Another interesting divergence is this photograph, which V referred to as a “snapshot”:

I say this is interesting because, out of the entire series, this is the one photograph which I would say is least like a snapshot. All the others actually do have snapshot qualities — some are snapped on the fly, many are made with little to no active attempts at “good” composition, etc. I think in this case, and in many cases, “snapshot” really just means, “photograph I don’t like but I’m not sure why.” (Alternate usage: “photograph I like but don’t want to acknowledge as a good photograph.”)

V gravitated toward photographs which had what he referred to as “human interest” — the photographs I included which are more street-oriented or psuedo-documentary. His specific advice as regards the prints themselves tended to go towards making the flags more visible and identifiable as flags, and to recovering lost detail in the flag markings.

I explained that this was basically directly contrary to my intentions. What drew me to this subject is the way infrared photography effaces the markings of flags and frees them (albeit temporarily, partially) from their habitual symbolic uses. So, the tendency of the flags’ markings to wash out is essential, whereas the “human interest” content is secondary — used to give a context for the portrayal of the flags themselves.

I don’t think this clicked solidly for V, because he tended to keep hitting these points as the discussion went on, regardless. He also characterized my explanation of the project as “symbolic,” which is sort of, but not really, in the right neighborhood. What I’m interested in is the way photography can, without physically changing an object, remove or suspend its symbolic value. I tried to convey that, with mixed success; after that he started calling it “non-symbolic symbolism.” Not really an improvement.

The funny thing is, I found this whole conversation to be not only entertaining and engaging, but also strangely comforting. I’ve never felt so good about being poorly or incompletely understood.

Of course, this is not to say that we should always celebrate when people don’t like our work, or when people don’t “get” our work. I’m not interested in producing work for an elite audience, however defined. But I am pleased to have elicited a strong response which is more than casually related to what I intend for this project, and I am pleased at having been able to articulate most of those intentions in discussion to my own satisfaction.

As to the project itself, I need to continue to produce work for it and to work on refining the sequencing. The balance and relationship between the more “documentary” photographs and the more (for want of a better word) “abstract ones needs to be improved; in its current form, the ambiguity regarding that relationship weakens the sequence, because it seems like two sequences that have merely been interleaved. If I can fix that, it will hopefully provide a better stepping-off point for viewers and make it easier for them to see along with me…

Warning: This is going to be very nerdy and tech-y. If IR photography isn’t your thing, just look at the pictures and move on, unless you want a serious soporific. I’ll put up a less geeky post on IR street photography later.

I’m not going to do a whole tutorial write-up thing on how to go about this, because there are already a couple of good ones here and here.

The first one does a great job of explaining how to go about putting a gel on your flash with a bit of space to prevent, you know, melting. However, the filter mentioned there has a non-optimal cutoff for IR film currently in production. The second one (which will be of particular interest to XA shooters) provides a film/filter pairing which is currently available and works great: Ilford SFX gel filters and Rollei IR400 film.

I tried this combination out with my Nikkormat FT-2, 2.8cm f/3.5 Nikkor-H (a great lens for IR work), and a Nikon SB-24.

Shooting wide open with the flash at full power produces usable exposures for subjects in the 8-15′ range, give or take, with some definite (but acceptable) overexposure for subjects close up.

This is reasonably consistent with the flash’s calculations for ISO 12 (which is what I normally rate IR400 at when shooting with an R72 filter), which suggests I may be able to engage auto mode — or, if subjects aren’t too distant, I may even be able to shoot safely at f/5.6, which would be lovely from a DOF standpoint.

With the Nikkormat and 28mm f/3.5, I’m shooting blind, because I’m working with an opaque infrared filter over the lens. (Note: for night photography, this can be omitted. However, since current IR films are sensitive to visible light, using them for flash work without a filter on the lens during the day is likely to be somewhat counterproductive.) However, with a 28mm lens, even wide open, I have enough DOF to scale focus reasonably well, and guessing the composition isn’t too hard.

BTW, if you’re curious about how scale focus works, this may be helpful:

Anyway, after all that technical mumbo-jumbo, what matters is, it works!

I’m even reasonably pleased with that photograph as such — successful test aside.

The one downside to this setup is that it tends to let through a little more visible light than I’d like — the SFX gels are a little loose in that regard. Not so much that I’m blinding people, but it bugs me just a little.

So, I’m also still fiddling around with alternative options. One not-really-successful setup is this:

It’s a thick eBay 89b filter intended for Cokin-type filter holders which I’ve taped to the front of a wonderfully cumbersome and powerful Sunpak 622. This setup works quite well for digital IR flash with my unmod’d D40, and emits very little visible light, but is completely useless with Rollei IR400. However, initial tests on a less powerful flash provided some exposure with Eke IR820. (Which suggests that the eBay filter isn’t a true 89b equivalent.)

I was hopeful that the Sunpak (which I got specifically for this project) would enable me to shoot with this filter/film combination through sheer power. And it does, sort of, but unfortunately the working distance is still too short to be really useful in the majority of situations.

That was shot at f/1.7, and you can see that even just at about 8′ feet or so, it’s already significantly underexposed. So, while this is not a failure, as such, it’s obviously of very limited practical usefulness unless I’m willing to get truly in-your-face. I’ll continue experimenting with different filtration options and see what I can get on this front.

US and California Flags

I spent much of Saturday printing this image in the Laney darkroom. (This is a negative scan; I haven’t scanned or photographed the resulting prints.) I had a fairly pleasant time of it, despite still being in recovery from the BBC plague. One of those days when my instincts lead in the right direction and the negative isn’t outside my modest printing skills. I also got some positive feedback from some of the old hands there, which is always nice.

The essential draw of the photograph, which I am somewhat ambivalent about, is its resemblance to a calla lily.

On the one hand, one of the things I love most about photography in general and about infrared photography in particular is its ability to subtly transform the familiar — to reveal the known world in surprising ways.

This is an example of that, and I believe a rather successful one; there are few objects which are more strongly locked in to their customary symbolic use than a flag; the vast majority of representations of flags fall into either nationalistic/patriotic uses or into very blunt subversions of those uses.

But here, motion distorts the flags’ shapes, and infrared light obscures their markings. Together, they allow the flags to briefly become something else.

I like that — a lot — but I worry a bit about the fact that the typical response to the image is, (a), “What is that,” and, (b), “Cool, it looks like a calla lily.” Not that I dislike the resemblance, but I’m always a bit nervous when I stray into the territory of “picture puzzles” and “fuzzygrams.” I don’t think the purpose of a photograph should be to befuddle or confuse (note: this is not a general rule for judging photography, just a personal preference for my own work).

I value the fact that this photograph documents the temporary transformation of a flag into a flower; however, that value is as dependent on the ability of the viewer to perceive what it “really is,” as it is upon their ability to perceive the way it is being transformed. And of course to say that it depends upon the viewer’s perception is also to say it depends on my ability to connect to the viewer…

It’s not a fruitless process, though. Aside from the little knowledge I’ve scraped together, and the lots of practice, I’ve come away with a few interesting images. Including the first digital images I’ve shot in ages that I care about.

Infrared flash is an interesting technique. I’m not doing anything original here, of course. IR flash for street photography has been around for ages, Weegee and Kohei Yoshiyuki being the most obvious reference points here. I’m not really interested in shooting movie theater makeouts or nighttime park perverts, but I am interested in the ability to fire off a flash without much visible light. It’s not really a question of stealth in my case so much as it is of wanting to experiment with flash on the street without blasting hapless strangers in the face with it — which is behavior I frown on as a matter of common courtesy.

As you might expect, this stuff is hard, especially for me. It’s the middle part of a Venn diagram of technically demanding photography — the intersection of infrared work and flash work. Both are tricky, both can be very counterintuitive, and both are very easy to screw up when you’re trying to work fast on the move and every shot counts.

IR is hard because you’re dealing with an opaque filter (making composition and focusing a matter of guesswork on SLRs), focus has to be adjusted if you’re not stopping down, and working ISOs on film and unconverted digital bodies is quite low. (Think ISO 1.5-12, depending.)

Flash — of the kind I’m doing here — is hard because it’s harsh, flat, and it kills anything that’s good or interesting about the natural light in the scene. It makes any kind of instinct you may have honed for spotting useful light redundant.

Combine the flash and the IR and it gets worse. Results get less predictable and more tricky to control. You need to scramble to get any kind of DOF — I’m currently using a massive handle flash just for a 1-2 stop advantage. And despite trying several flash/filter/film combos, I have yet to get workable results on film.

So, why is it worth all the trouble? I’m not sure it really is, to be honest. This may not be something I ever get really right. But there are things to be learned here that may be applicable not only to IR flash but to other types of photography.

The main thing is that using flash as the main source of illumination and working with a seriously weakened flash sort of reduces street photography to its most basic form — or one of its most basic forms. No tricks of light, no elegantly composed scenes — it’s just not practical. All you have is a person or a group, within or just outside arm’s reach, and a camera pointed at them.

Of course, I’m unlikely to do my best work this way, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t appreciate it. (I’m not a fan of Bruce Gilden’s work along these lines, for example, and there’s no way I’ll ever do it as well as he does.) But I suspect in years to come I’ll be glad that I’ve done these experiments — if only because my curiosity will have been satisfied…

So, I finally got around to shooting, developing, and scanning some infrared film. Yay!

For my first try, I used Efke IR820 Aura. This is the version without anti-halation layer, intended to mimic Kodak HIE. Of course, I’ve never shot HIE, so I have no idea whether it succeeds or fails in this regard.

I went with this to start off rather than straight IR820 in 120 (which I also have) because I wanted to be able to both shoot several subjects and bracket my shots, so 36 exposures made more sense than 10.

I used my Nikkormat and, for the most part, my 28mm f/3.5 H — a lens which I know from experience and Rorslett’s reviews to work well with IR.

I’m using D-76 1:1, which doesn’t have a listed time on the data sheet, so I guesstimated the increase over the time for stock. (I used 9min. at 70.5 degrees). I metered for ISO 3, which is what’s specified by the data sheet for use with my filter (Hoya R72). I bracketed my shots, and in a couple of cases, I preferred an exposure two stops over that, but for the most part, ISO 3 gave the best results. (That translated to about 1/4 of a second at f/8 for the conditions I was shooting in, mostly.)

Very slow, but not too slow to include seated people, such as in the scene at The Med. And faster shutter speeds could be obtained by the use of larger apertures, at the cost of depth of field. Pushing is also a possibility, but it’s not like it isn’t grainy and contrasty enough to begin with…

This is pretty much the exact opposite of the workflow I used last with IR — careful long exposure tripod shots using exposure blending to maximize tonal range. This was scale or guesstimate focused, and composed with even less precision, and exposed at or over the limit of what I could handhold safely, and working with the very limited dynamic range at high ISO. The results — while still IR — have a very different feel. Softer (of course), grainer (of course), and overall with a bit of a toy camera feel.

One thing that sort of surprises me about these images is that I find myself cropping them far less than I do most of my images. Usually I crop at least a little to adjust framing or trim off extraneous bits — which only makes sense; none of my cameras has 100% viewfinder coverage, anyway. But some of these shots, framed without the benefit of any kind of finder whatsoever, seem to work compositionally to the point that I don’t feel any urge to crop them at all.

Weird.

Anyway, this definitely makes me want to get into film IR, and/or get a body conversion. This ability IR has to reveal bring something otherworldly to mundane views — or, more accurately, to reveal something otherworldly within mundane views — is getting addictive.

I won’t go into detail on the underlying science, because there are far better explicators around than me. It was actually something that for quite a while held zero interest for me; it sounded like something goofy and technical. And certainly a lot of the IR stuff running around the internet (which is frequently of the false color variety) is less than inspiring — a lot of it suffers from the same syndrome as a lot of HDR — the technique become its own aesthetic, and people no longer want to make photographs that are good enough; they instead aspire to make photographs that are HDR enough or IR enough.

This is, of course, a pretty narrow view of this type of photography. (That’s what you get when you define a whole genre of art using just what you happen to stumble across online.) I didn’t clue into that until I noticed how Minor White used IR for some of his landscape work. (I have a note here in a prior draft of this post regarding plate 121 of The Eye That Shapes, in particular.)

Of course, I knew that slapping a Hoya R72 filter on my D40 would hardly turn me into Minor White. But it’s something that I had been wanting to try, and so a few weeks ago, I did. It’s certainly been an educational experience.

The nature of digital IR (with an unmodified camera) dictates the use of a tripod, thanks to typically long exposures and of course the need to correct focus using the IR index. (Thank goodness I use old lenses which have them.)

Any time you’re shooting from a tripod, it forces you to slow down and think about how you’re composing and exposing a scene. This is doubly (maybe triply) so when you also have to focus, screw on a filter that blocks visible light, refocus using the IR index, and guess whether to boost exposure by eight or ten stops — then shoot, try to gauge the three-channel histogram with an eye toward the peculiarities of post-processing IR, and then repeat the whole process with the next subject.

This can all be very frustrating, but in some ways it’s also refreshing. The slow pace necessitated by the equipment can offer time for contemplation which isn’t present, or at least not in the same way, when shooting fast-paced subjects. And working with the camera procedurally, like a lot of darkroom processes, can become an almost meditative affair — provided you can maintain attention.