BEYOND VISIBLE LIGHT

Back in analog days, when I was photographing just about everything with black-and-white infrared film, I never gave a thought to shooting color infrared. The slide film’s palette of pinks, yellows and cyans, typified by the fish-eye cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced, was too far-out for me.

Now, decades later, I find myself shooting color infrared because aside from being able to change it to one’s liking in post-production, it just looks different—and better—when captured digitally. Digital infrared is still those crazy wavelengths beyond the red end of visible light—but combine it with the remarkable flexibility of digital capture’s RAW files, and you have a marriage made in photographic heaven.

At first, I converted all my digital infrared files to black-and-white. For a few years, I shot with the Fujifilm UVIR, a DSLR really designed for forensic purposes, but I eventually graduated to a Nikon D600 converted for shooting color infrared by LifePixel, one of several companies that perform the service. LifePixel offers a range of “filter” options installed over the camera sensor that enable you to record progressively longer waves of infrared radiation. The filters that allow the longest infrared wavelengths to reach the sensor produce image files containing very