Will Gunadi Photography

“Tilted As Charged”

Always wanted to take infra-red (IR) photos.  Those ethereal, surreal, cereal photographs that is both haunting and beautiful, our world seen in the wavelength that are not natural to our eyes: Infra Red.

As usual, I opted for the traditional way of doing this, using a good ol’ roll of film.

Enter a company in Croatia, called Fotokemika, which manufactured the film featured in this journal entry: Efke 820.

Nerd FYI: It is named 820 because the emulsion is sensitized to 820 nanometer wavelength and longer (IR started at about 700 nm).

Having bought a couple rolls of this film several months ago Freestyle Photography (http://www.freestylephoto.biz), I was bidding my time to get the rest of the ingredients together.

Which brings us to…

The Filter and The Camera

First of all, even I can deduce that the perfect camera for IR photography is a rangefinder, why? because IR photography requires putting a dark (very dark)  red filter in front of the lens.

Using an SLR means you can’t see a thing, let alone compose and focus.    So you have to compose, focus, put the filter on — hoping that the focus or the camera hasn’t moved when you did that — and click!

Using a rangefinder camera means you can see everything since the filter is on the lens, not on the rangefinder/viewfinder and on a rangefinder camera, you never see through the lens.  Thus you put the filter on once in the beginning and just focus, compose, and click.  See the difference?

For the filter, I opted for a Hoya R72 from a seller at the big auction site.  The lens is very well-built (not cheap) and of course… very dark.  Nuff’ said.

Since I bought the film in the 120 format — following the old adage: If you went through the hassle to do all this, might as well get a big negative –  the obvious candidate is either the big-honkin’ Mamiya Press Universal, or the svelte Fuji GA645wi.  Guess which one wins:

The Shoot

So there I was, in a gorgeous Autumn day inside the Japanese Garden in Ft. Worth Botanical Garden, with the camera and filter at hand.  Nothing could go wrong, or could it?

if you know me by now, you’d expect one or two… or three … er, miscalculations:

• No tripod, IR photography is done 90% on a tripod, because the exposure is kinda long for handheld operation.  I’ll spare you the sad story of why I end up without one that day.
• No exposure guide, either 1/2 or 1 second at wide open.  Since the lens on the Fuji is so sharp, wide-open aperture turned out to be not a problem.
• No manual focus, I haven’t figured out how to set the distance using the camera (yeah, yeah… RTFM).  So despite my using an RF, I end up doing the take-off-filter-focus-compose-put-filter-on acrobatics anyways.
• Hand-mounted filter, the Fuji has 52mm filter ring, and my Hoya R72 filter is 58mm, great… just great…

By the way, as if it’s not obvious the above list is “What not to do” when you prepare to do IR photography, let my painful IR-shooting-session be a warning to you.

It is just by the miracle of heaven that I managed to get something like this:

“The Only Unshakey One”

Not that bad for a handheld, guesstimeter shot, isn’t it?

I credit the sharpness of the lens and the film latitude than the clumsy operator behind those two.

Two more that I am quite happy with:

and

Part Three: Developing

Scouring photography forums and the internet in general, I got the impression that IR sensitive films do not require special handling after it’s being exposed, other than being extra careful when opening the roll and spooling it onto the reel.

The Efke 820 film is known to have a softer emulsion than say, T-Max, but I never rough up a film when spooling anyways, so again, not a big deal.

Developed in Rodinal 1+50 dilution for 12 min., I finally see for the first time, an honest-to-goodness IR negative.  Looks pretty thin, but quite distinct and the exposure doesn’t seem to vary much even though the shortest one I made was 1/4th of a second, and the longest one is a full second.

The negative dried cleanly and the emulsion proved to be able to withstand the scanner-glass sandwiching.  I have yet to wet-print one of these, so I’ll add some more info when I got around to do that.

In Conclusion

The whole process is way easier than I thought.  Despite so many factors against it, I end up with at least one picture that I can be satisfied with.

One thing for sure, I’ll do this again, hopefully next time with a better preparation and execution.   Just hope that God will grant me another Dark Sunny Day to do this in.