What is Infrared Photography?
What is infrared photography? The answer to this question is quite simple. Infrared, as defined by the National Institutes of Health, is any waves which have the ability to transmit information. In other words, any wave that has the ability to send a signal can be considered as an infrared wave.
So, infrared photography entails taking pictures of objects and their infrared radiations so that you are able to transmit the information via your camera lens to a monitor or a television screen. Read on to find out more about what is infrared photography and the basics of it.
An infrared digital camera uses an infrared spectrum. What is infrared photography, then, is nothing but the study of all the various spectra of infrared light waves.
In fact, the name spectrum is based on the Greek word “the sun’s spectrum,” which refers to the visible light waves.
To explain this further: infrared photography captures light waves that have the ability to pass through a medium, usually a filter, so that you can convert the image seen through the filter into an infrared signal.
In this way, infrared photography captures light waves that have the ability to pass through a filter and/or glass filter, and thus converts the signal seen through those filters into infrared.
You may be wondering why you would need to use an infrared camera with an SLR camera. Well, in fact, there are two major reasons.
First, infrared photography is typically done on dark backgrounds, so if you have a dark room with a white balance settings that is ideal for photo shooting you will be fine.
However, if you have a room with a very high temperature the color of your subject will end up being blown out.
The camera then needs to use the white balance setting to compensate for the temperature change. This is where the custom white balance setting comes in.
The second reason that you may want to use an infrared photography camera is because of their ability to make adjustments automatically.
Most cameras these days come with some sort of automatic white balance adjustment layer. If you are taking a picture in manual mode (by turning the camera on and off continuously) you will be able to adjust the color settings to match what you expect the scene to be like.
If you have the correct white balance settings for the scene, then the entire scene will be captured in the shot. If the camera doesn’t have such a feature, then it will try to compensate until it finds the correct color balance.
Infrared photography has two major purposes in photography; namely, to capture the visible light and to capture the infrared light.
The reason that infrared is often used for this purpose is because it is the only light in which it is possible to take a photograph with no interference from optical light, which means that there is no color distortion in the visible spectrum.
In addition, there are wavelengths of light that can not be photographed through mechanical means, which means that they are perfect for taking photographs in all ranges of electromagnetic spectrum.
All electromagnetic waves fall into the infrared spectrum. Infrared light is invisible when viewed through human eyes, but only when stimulated with an infrared source.
This type of photography also has another great way to use it – spot lighting. Spotlights can be a great way to illuminate a large area quickly and without much effort.
With infrared photography, all of the parts of a landscape that receives intense light are illuminated – including the background. By using landscape photography techniques, the background and foreground elements are made much more interesting and dynamic.
One of the key things that make infrared photography so useful is that the camera settings allow for long exposures. This is because it only uses relatively short wavelengths, and since they are invisible to the eye, they don’t interfere with each other during long exposures like longer wavelengths would.
There is also no need to use a tripod in this type of photography, as the camera can remain stable even when being moved, which is very important in long exposures.
Long exposures with a tripod can cause some movement in the visible spectrum, which is something that a tripod would result in, making the entire scene more distracting than useful.
There are also other important features in what is infrared photography that make it worth learning.
The camera has an automatic channel mixer adjustment layer that allows you to blend the red and blue channels to blend everything together. It also has an auto focus layer and a manual focus layer.
Some of these features are unique, but can be found in many cameras. The bottom line is that knowing what is infrared photography helps you create your own photography work.