Up until today, I’ve been shooting near-infrared images on an IR modified Fuji X100 (after a short, painful dalliance with a modified 20D) which was converted via a full-spectrum (minus UV) conversion: the hot filter was replaced with UV opaque glass meaning that the camera can be used as normal with an external hot filter mounted, or with any choice of IR frequency filter applied.

I had chosen to use an 830nm-ish filter and convert the result into monochrome in camera (as there’s little normal colour information left) and for additional contrast, it’s often a B&W+R setting in camera so any clear blue skies are rendered almost black – there’s loads of examples in the gallery

After seeing a range of other false colour IR images online and realising that it’s trivial to swap the red and blue channels of an image via a macro in Affinity Photo, I started looking for a 550nm or 590nm filter and after a relatively unsuccessful hunt (one source, expensive, and with high shipping costs) realised that non-engineers tend to describe filters in human helpful terms rather than wavelengths (see more about the visible spectrum) and that I had a 20+ year old red filter left sat in a drawer from my film days.

One of the drawbacks of 830nm IR photography in the UK is that there are only a few months of the year when the natural light is strong enough for it to be just like shooting a normal camera. It doesn’t need much of a drop in the light levels for the ISO to start climbing, but today I tried a series of filters on the same image, with same relative exposure and the difference was huge: my ‘unknown but 620nm (ish) filter gave me an ISO of 200, a 720nm filter was ISO 500, the 830nm ISO 1000 and at 930nm it was up to ISO 3200. Needless to say, winter IR photography yields much nicer images when going further into the visible spectrum.

So I make no apologies for the next series of rather similarly toned images, nor will I apologise for taking IR photographs in a church yard – it’s the equivalent of the “obligatory cat photo” for IR photographers, and we must all publish some at least once in our lives…