Busy, Busy, Busy - Photographically and Otherwise

After not shooting for my fairy project for over a year, it seems things are picking up. So far this year I've shot Garden Fairy and Woodland Fairy, and I'm scheduled to shoot Summer Fairy, Bubble Fairy, Sand Fairy, Water Fairy, and Waterfall Nymph this week, as well as River Fairy next week. Additionally, I have models lined up to shoot Dream Fairy, Dance Fairy, Earth Fairy, Forge Fairy, Rock Fairy, Combat Fairy and Spring Fairy in August. After that, I'll probably need to take a break for a while to process the images and decide which ones should be included in the book and the calendar. In the meantime, I'm definitely staying busy with the shoots.

I did a test shoot with Holly yesterday afternoon. She is going to be my Waterfall Nymph (Fairy) which is planned to shoot on Sunday. I also interviewed Jane, who has some great ideas and the look for the Rock (Music) Fairy, and with Krisa, who had some great concepts for her Dance Fairy. I actually had a beer and was able to have a long and entertaining conversation with Krisa whose enthusiasm was quite contagious.

The photos you see here are some infrared shots from my test shoot with Holly. I'll be incorporating infrared into the future fairy shoots for an alternative look to give a more ethereal feel to some of the images. I'll be trying that out this afternoon when I shoot Summer Fairy with Ashley (a new model). Ashley is actually in the downstairs bath with her friend putting on the makeup for the Summer Fairy shoot as I edit this entry.

So, I have a very busy week ahead and with any luck I'll be getting some great images for the project and will have a lot of fun with some great models as we work together to create some exciting and fun photos.

Unfortunately, my right knee is still giving me significant issues (severe pain and muscle spasms which are exacerbated by walking), but I'm trying to bull through the pain and the limp with my trusty cane until I can get back to see my doctor on the 18th. Unfortunately for me, I'm one of those photographers that just loves to kneel or squat to shoot low angles of their subjects and my knee just doesn't work that way right now. Nevertheless, the shoots must go on.

Infrared Photography

I've long been interested in infrared photography, but it's always seemed such as hassle to me. Back in the film days you had to buy special film, then load it in basically darkroom conditions. On top of that, certain cameras couldn't use the film because they used infrared beams in the body to count the frame advances. Finally, to shoot with infrared you had to use a special R72 filter to let only infrared light into the camera, which meant you had to pre-focus before you put the filter on and that your exposure would be extremely long compared to
a normal exposure.

In most cases, the advent of digital cameras didn't change things much really. While the digital sensor is, in fact, sensitive to both visible and infrared light, camera manufacturers place a filter over the sensor that among other things, removes the infrared light. So, while you didn't need to load the film in the dark, you still had to use an R72 filter to remove the visible light and exposures were still lengthy. Some cameras were much better than others at capturing infrared. The Olympus C2020Z, which I owned for a while, had a good reputation for IR photography, though I never actually used it for infrared.

What did change, however, was that the IR filter in a digital camera body could be removed and replaced with a sensor cover that did allow the infrared (actually Near Infrared) light to pass and all0ws for infrared photography without the use of an R72 filter and with normal exposure times. The image above is a test shot from my Canon 20D DSLR which has had this conversion completed. It was just returned from Lifepixel today (after about three weeks away) and this was taken in my back yard with a Canon EF 50 f/1.4 lens and converted to B&W. The image below was left in color and the red and blue channels reversed to make the sky blue vs. red.

This is going to make photography a bit more fun this summer, and I plan to use the converted camera extensively, but not exclusively, as part of my fairy project. It will also be fun to use it for some landscape photography along the Oregon Coast and for my planned trip to Crater Lake National Park.