On Wednesday I received the package with my new full-spectrum camera. This is essentially a regular digital camera where the infrared filter at the sensor has been removed and the sensor has now become sensitive to all wavelengths of light, visible or not.

I received another package with an infrared flashlight. That puppy is weird. It produces only light waves that are invisible to the human eye. When I put the batteries in there was no way to see that it was working until I looked at it through my full-spectrum camera in live view.

I opted for full-spectrum over a straight infrared camera because I had an idea. The idea was to do a single light painting shot where some of the light was captured exclusively in the infrared spectrum and some of the light was from the visible spectrum.

This required shooting some of the image with an 850nm IR pass filter (only allowing a certain small spread of IR wavelengths of light through) and then "painting" my subject. I'm not usually a fan of extraneous quotation marks but in this case it feels justified. In typical light painting you can at least see the light that you are casting from your light source. Using an infrared flashlight you don't get this satisfaction; it just looks like you're standing in front of someone in the dark and waving a tube that is doing nothing. At least the light didn't cause my model to blink!

After shooting Emily with the infrared flashlight I had her remain still and I removed the IR-pass filter and replaced it with an IR/UV cut filter. This is essentially the opposite of the first one in that it allows visible light to pass through and blocks infrared and ultraviolet. This makes the sensor function pretty much the same as a regular digital camera that has a UV filter on the lens and an IR-cut filter on the sensor. The background was then painted in using my faux-fire brush.

In order to get the IR color-effect I wanted I had to white balance my camera towards green. This made the color portion of the shot hard but it did create satisfying IR shots. I did several IR shots before and after but this shot here is the one I'd been waiting for: a shot combining infrared light painting photography in the foreground and visible spectrum light painting photography in the background. It's actually kind of neat how the background light splashes down onto her shoulders linking the two portions of the picture.

This shot was born out of a desire to have black and white elements in a picture combined with color, but to do it entirely in-camera. Standard optics doesn't work that way and eventually I thought to step into the infrared spectrum as a way of exploring this. An upside to this approach is that now I actually have a direction for art that I'd like to explore during daylight hours too! (straight infrared photography)

A big thanks to Emily and Joel for coming over last night to both art and to watch the hockey game with me. I have several more pictures from the night, several of which capture this effect better, but this one is the first one I'm sharing because it was the the very first picture I created that combines both. I haven't seen this done before, if anyone knows of someone else who has played with this approach I'd love to hear about it! If not... I'm happy to forge new ground!