Thomas O’Brien

Like so many budding photographers, an early exposure *cough* to photography was sufficient enough for the hobby to cement itself in me as a worthy and pleasurable pursuit. Having an artistic bent but being mediocre with a pencil, pen or paintbrush, photography was duly welcomed as a cathartic means of expression.

My father was undoubtedly the biggest influence in these formative years. Unlike most photographers, the equipment I was exposed to was even then antiquated, with my father employing (even to this day) pre-war cameras. Black and white film was the order of the day, with colour film being relegated to the ranks of the undesirably modern. There is much to be said for an image sans couleur, with hues of grey replacing the the normal palette of colours in often unusual and dramatic fashions.

Graduating from a simple point-and-click camera (procured for the then princely sun of five dollars at a garage sale) to an early 1960s Retinette, early photographic results got better. Discarding the Retinette shortly thereafter for a similar vintage Pentax SLR yielded even better results, and made possible the employment of coloured filters, furthering a dramatic black and white style still a hallmark in my photography to this day.

A chance encounter with a photographic book in high school made me aware of an unusual branch of capturing images, infrared photography. Being naturally drawn to the esoteric and obscure, infrared photography presented as a fascinating venture. This was all before digital photography came to the fore, so infrared photography was still achieved using special films which have long since ceased to be manufactured.

The visible spectrum, which any creature not deprived of its earthly vision has ready access to, is generally perceived as being all there is to photograph. With the right equipment, a delving into the imperceptible is possible. Just beyond the visible spectrum lies a realm permeated by wavelengths not humanly accessible. With the infrared spectrum beginning at around 700 nanometers and extending to about 1000nm, this realm is strictly off limits to even the most eagle-eyed amongst us. While infrared photography is possible by conventional means of film, the digital era has cast aside the difficulties and cumbersome nature of using film.

Interesting things happen when rendering this part of the electromagnetic spectrum into an image, and, when coupled with black and white, can produce images with an otherworldly and almost always dramatic effect. Foliage, for example, reflects a huge amount of infrared light due to the chlorophyll, and rather than being rendered as the usual dark grey transforms into a visual three act opera of stark white. Blue skies and water go the other way, with inky blackness the norm.

Whilst hues of grey are frequently seen as per normal black and white, infrared tends to be high contrast naturally, with a correlation between the nanometer rating of the filter and the end result; a 720nm filter yields a somewhat noir style whereas 950nm will give an extreme amount of contrast virtually eliminating any grey, resulting in black and white in the truest sense.

Despite conventional black and white being a staple since the outset of photography, and with B&W being employed over so many styles, genres and approaches, infrared offers a skewed take and an unfamiliar bent to this much loved but admittedly antiquated style. A peeking into an otherwise hidden realm offers opportunity to revisit black and white photography anew. It is this photographer’s view that the marriage of a long established style and a furthered development of technology and understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum be cause enough for enquiry and exploration.

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