El Paso Sphinx, Infrared series, 1977 by ©Bruce Berman
Infrared film was very weird, quite difficult and unpredictable and seriously cool. The flm had to be loaded into the camera in a totally dark room or in a changing bag. One needed to put a seriously dense red filter over the lens (we’re talking about B/W infrared film): an 87C Kodak Wratten Filter to be exact.
The filter was so thick that you could barely see the subject.
You could use the standard light meter to determine your expsoure but in addition to that you needed prayer!
Why?
Because what you were shooting wasn’t the visible light spectrum but the spectrum that is invisible, the infrared light spectrum
There are many technical ways to describe the materials, the process and the method, but for me, prayer was my method.
Prayer?
Well, let’s just say I took a lot of frames to hope to get one good one.
Trudy, Infrared, 1970s
BUT, when you did, you got magic! A dream world. Something you couldn’t imagine and, indeed, because infrared captured light beyond the visible scale, you did, indeed, get something beyond rational.
If you shot it enougth, you got better at it, but never mastered it. It mastered you. Your intuition was a way better guide than any study of how to use it.
Admittedly there were a lot of really bad frames, in fact, unuseable.
Once in a while there were good ones… no… make that great ones!
