Daddy, make a picture

for getting some gardening work done.. and for shooting some black and white infrared film.

I’ve been playing with Kodak High-Speed Infrared Film, or HIE, for a while now. It’s called ‘high-speed’ because they recommend a speed of 400. But in the real world, if you follow their recommendation and slap a #25 red filter on your lens, you’ll be shooting at an effective speed of 25.

With the extended red sensitivity and the further addition of the red filter, images have an almost surreal dreamy quality. Reds are raised to almost white, skin tones take on an alabaster tone, the sky is often almost black. The downside is the effect can become cliche. There are way too many ‘moonscape’ images shot with HIE floating around the Web.

Some good examples can be found at Joe Paduano’s web site. He’s kind of a guru of infrared.

Shooting outdoors on a sunny day like today should give me some interesting stuff to print.

PS… Note to Sue… I think I’ve taken more than my share of beautiful pictures of you. And I think that picture was one of them. But if you insist…..