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    White grass, white foliage, white clouds in the black sky, whitened red-brick houses, black water, and absence of haze. In a word, summer-like winter or winter-like summer! This is how a standard infrared landscape looks (See photo 1). Any photographer can make such pictures nowadays.

    1. The Dubna River. IR shooting. Camera Nikon D 70.

    Infrared shooting, the shooting in invisible rays, has been connected with great difficulties recently. In USSR special films were produced for scientific purposes; these films were sensible to the rays having length from 760 to 920 nanometers – “Infrachrome - 760” and “Infrachrome - 880”. These films were great tenderlings. They lost their sensitivity even at room temperature. Thus, they were kept in refrigerators. Special light filters for infrared shooting were also produced then; such filters kept the film save from unwanted visible rays or parts of such rays. They had crimson (KS-14 and KS-19) or completely black (IKS-1, IKS-2, IKS-3) colour.
Imagine that you have put such completely black filter on the lens of a reflex camera. You won’t be able to see anything in the viewfinder. Shooting without a tripod is impossible. You have to shoot with the help of a tripod and make focus by means of a special scale with yellow figures since the invisible IR-rays are refracted in optical glass differently from the visible rays. When I met landscapes shot in an infrared film in photographic magazines of 1970’s I felt like the fox from the famous fable by Krylov “The fox and grape”. This wonderful grape was actually unripe then, but now it has ripened.
My IR-landscapes were shot with Japanese 8-megapixel digital camera Sony 828. It disappointed me at first. Its eight million pixels were not a patch on the Nikon 5-6 megapixels on bigger-sized matrix. I called this camera Sonylet and adapted it for teaching my grandson. I considered this camera not appropriate for serious work. But one evening the light was switched off in our flat (that has become common in our block of flats long ago). While our grandson was having supper the grandmother told him Easter stories about the Resurrection. I lightened a candle; I was always charmed with this flickering light. I took the Sony camera in my hands and turned NightShot mode on.
I decided that it was a good chance to test the night mode of the camera. The picture in the camera screen appeared to be perfect. I made some photos of my grandson in automatic mode at which 1/30 seconds exposure is always used what allows shooting without a tripod in most cases. When the light was switched on I turned my computer on and was disappointed a bit because the picture was very grainy. On the other hand it conveyed the light conditions and small parts perfectly: an Easter cake, Easter egg, candlestick, the table-cloth pattern and even the window curtain which was in one and a half meter from the candle (See photo 2).