A Walk along the Soar in
Infra-Red
Back in the 90s I decided to try taking
infra-red photos. I'd read about them, and all the interesting effects you
could get with filters, so I purchased a roll of infra-red slide film and loaded
it into my Zenith SLR.
I went for a walk along the River Soar,
and the Loughborough Canal, with my then girlfriend, Paula. This was
summer 1991 as I recall.
Please excuse the spots on the
slides. They were 15 years old before I finally took them along to a shop
to have them scanned into digital, and they didn't do them in the particularly
correct order, so you've got canal mixed with river and so on..
Infra-red film reacts to the
infra-red spectrum in strange ways. If you add coloured filters
to your camera lens you get what is often called a "false colour"
effect. Adding a red filter produced the most dramatic
effects - turning the vegetatation an orangey-yellow, and the sky and
water (which is of course reflected sky) green.
Infra-red also cuts out haze, which is why you can
see that the sky and water surface is particularly sharp in these pictures, as
are the clouds.
The least interesting photos - the ones where
everything has a dull purplish cast - are the raw unfiltered photos. I
can't remember what filter I used for the ones where the vegetation is purple
but the water is blue. It may have been blue. The girl in the
pictures below is Paula. The handsome chap in the middle picture above is
me.
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