I Can See it For You Wholesale

For the last few weeks, I’ve mostly been chasing black triangles related to infrared flash photography and darkroom printing. It’s been a pretty tough slog, not so much because I’m not being productive (I really am) as because it feels like I’m chipping away at a mountain with a toothpick.

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…

So, a couple of days ago, I left my tripod at home on a day which turned out to have some really rockin thick white clouds. Exactly the sort I’ve been wanting to try my R72 on. The R72 was in my bag, so I decided to throw it on the camera and crank the ISO to 1600 and see what I got.

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.