I have always found infrared photography interesting although I have never shot it myself the closet I have ever got to it was emulating aerochrome on some digital photographs but that isn’t real infrared. Shooting real infrared film is long overdue especially as I now have a medium format film camera in the form of a Mamiya 645 pro. So with a roll of Rollei Infrared film and a Hoya IR72 filter I travelled the short distance to Blagdon Rings to try the film out.
When shooting with an IR72 filter which block most visible light and only allows Infrared light to pass which means that exposure times need to increase by about 6 stops and then there is reciprocity failure something you don’t have to worry about with digital cameras but film this needs to be factored in and all brands of film react differently here lies my first mistake of the day I calculated the reciprocity incorrectly so for instance a shot I metered with phone as I didn’t have a lightmeter on me (my second mistake) that I metered at 30 secs I calculated the adjusted exposure to be just over 60 secs should of in fact been 183sec so it was massively underexposed. I have included some of my photos here failures and successes, this one experiment taught me a lot about infrared photography enough to take out another roll of Rollei IR film shortly.
If you want to see the behind the scenes of how I took these photos take a look at my youtube video
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