Nearly two months ago, I sent off nine rolls of film to be developed. Four of these were cinema film, which requires a special process that most photo labs do not perform. Since my lab at home tends to take a while with black and white film, I decided I might as well ship the five B+W rolls from my trip to Santa Fe out to the same interstate lab. Between USPS appearing to have lost the package and repeated inaccurate updates from the lab claiming they'd sent out the film, I finally received it for real today.
While losing any film is heartbreaking, I was particularly worried about never seeing how the two rolls of Rollei IR from the trip turned out. I had planned my camera choices around trying out infrared photography for the first time, and I really did not want to lose the results. If you haven't heard of it before, infrared photography involves the use of special film or sensors and lens filters to cut out the visible light spectrum in order to only capture the infrared light of a scene. For black and white photography, this generally results in dark, ominous skies and bright white foliage.
The dramatic skies are the main effect I'm after with infrared. As someone who usually shoots in the middle of the day, my regular black and white photos often end up being a somewhat interesting subject with a light gray sky, totally devoid of details. While scanning the results, the negatives sometimes look more interesting than the converted positive. Seeing subjects enveloped in a black void made me want to try out different methods to achieve such a look in my photography. My first roll with a red filter was pretty underwhelming, but I think I've found what I'm looking for with Rollei IR and a 720nm filter. Rollei IR isn't a "true" infrared film but a "near" infrared film (as far as I know, Kodak was the only to produce a full infrared spectrum film and it's long discontinued). I'm honestly not sure how different the results between the two are, but fortunately I'm happy with my fake-ass infrared.
Infrared photography has its drawbacks. To start, since almost all visible light is being cut out by the infrared filter, Rollei IR, a 400 ISO film, needs to be shot around 25 ISO. The infrared cut filter is also almost completely opaque, so blogs and videos often suggest composing first and then adding the filter. That sounds like a huge pain in the ass, so I opted to use a rangefinder camera to bypass the issue. Apart from filter issues, infrared light also focuses at a slightly different plane than visible light. I have no idea how this works. Physics are weird. The implication of this is that the "infinity" point of focus is slightly less infinity than the infinity on your lens, and every shot needs slightly adjusted to compensate for this. On a 40mm lens like I used, only a slight nudge of the focus ring is necessary, but the low working sensitivity of the film meant having to shoot at low enough apertures that even a small twist matters. It's quite easy to forget to make the adjustment, so even some of the keepers from this roll ended up a little out of focus.
This first roll was shot at the Rio Grande Gorge. If you followed me on Cohost, it may look familiar, as it is where some some of my cursed roll of Portra 400 was shot. I'll post a comparison between the infrared on a 40mm lens and the cursed color shots on the 28mm Fuji Tiara below. Hands down, my favorite shot on IR is the RV driving across the bridge spanning the gorge. This was the third shot on the roll, so I'm quite lucky it turned out in-focus and properly exposed.
