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Infrared Blues

WATCHING: Forrest Gump Robert Zemeckis, Director I finally purchased this DVD, and it's a great movie on a number of levels: 1) Special effects magic; 2) The stor(ies) of the Boomer generation encapsulated in the main characters' lives; 3) Wonderful music, and intelligent use thereof; 4) Just a nice, not too-sweet love story. Hey, any one of those four apply to almost no movies coming out these days; this has them all... All movies

Through the magic of Ebay, I purchased another digital camera body and had the fine folks at lifepixel.com convert it for infrared photography.

When I shot film, one of my passions was IR photography, and I missed it when I moved digital. When I saw it was possible to convert a digital body for IR, well, I'm in!

But here are the reasons for my blues over infrared:

• I'm out of practice with IR photography, having not shot any IR for about 10 years. IR is weird, and you have to train yourself. Plants - anything with chlorophyll - will bounce IR back like crazy, for example.


• IR digital photography is different than IR film photography - skies do not darken as much in digital, there is no use for a red filter (for film, help darkens skies to create more contrast with clouds). So more learning.


• Just haven't had the time to really experiment, go out and shoot a wide range of subjects to test how to bracket for different scenes/subjects and so on. And summer - which is the time for IR shooting - is slipping away from me.


• One of the things I DID remember about film IR photography that's the same with digital IR photography is that IR is always a crap shoot. Thank good for LED reviews of shots, instead of finding out in the darkroom hours/days later that you totally overexposed the film or some other error. We don't see in IR, we see in visible wavelengths, so it's hard to judge just how to compensate.

Oh well, have to make the time.