Infrared interlude

The first batch of my infrared photographs is ready. To have a break from those brown and blue landscapes, let's have a look at them in a different light.




I made these on expired Kodak HIE film with a Voigtlander Bessa T + 25mm Skopar combo and a 39mm Hoya R72 filter. This IR film is difficult to use because we can only guess the correct exposure (Kodak says "use 1/125 and f:11 but do a lot of bracketing"), and results are mostly an ugly grainy mess but sometimes it works fine. Using a film camera, especially a rangefinder, is so refreshing after digital - the sound of the flick with my thumb on the film forward lever is priceless.
The shot with the chorten and prayer flags was taken in Kalpa, the rest in Ladakh.

Infrared afternoon

Yesterday the sun was out at last so I grabbed my cameras and went for a hunt. But before, I had to fix the P-series Cokin 007 IR filter to my beloved 15mm Heliar lens. I used some black adhesive tape to narrow down the diameter of an 52mm A-series mount and fixed the P-holder via an A-to-P adapter. (All this fuss cos the my screw-in filter hasn't arrived after 1 month - eBay sometimes sucks.) Here's the result, on the left:



It will take some time to shoot all the 36 images on the Kodak HIE, though, so I took my 20D DSLR with the standard Hoya R72 as well. As usual, even with ISO @1600, it yielded no usable images under exposures of 60 seconds or so. I used a tripod.
This was way underexposed so I had to adjust it heavily in PS:

On this, I used Photo Wiz's BW Styler (T-Max and soft grade paper).

And yes, it IS possible to photograph people with a 60 secs exposure - if they do you the favour not to move :-)