Infrared II: Ulorin and the Heygate Estate

Ulorin Vex in infrared - the colour of Patrick Nagel

There's a popular location near Elephant & Castle, in London, called the Heygate Estate. It looks awful in a very photogenic way and it's being pulled down, as per this article in The Guardian. The whole area is being redeveloped, which is odd because London could do with a load of cheap homes. Here's a photograph of it, with the Strata building in the background:

All of the flats on the right are empty, all but a handful of the flats on the left are empty, and there are more buildings like this behind me and out of sight around the edges of the frame. Perhaps the flats were awful hellholes, Chinese water torture noise machines, evolved to crush the human spirit, but it seems senseless to smash the whole thing down. Where will the people go? Can't we house really really poor people in the flats? Poor people don't mind living in horrible conditions, in fact they rather enjoy it. Or we could build a wall around the whole area and use it as an experimental anarchist community. The possibilities are mind-boggling.

Here's the Strata building itself, shot from the block of flats in the far distance above:


Still, social matters are not my field. Like a tourist I decided to have a look at the place before it is gone. It's a fascinating location; in four hours there I saw two residents, one photo crew, two wandering photographers, pigeons, no-one else. It's like the radioactive city of Pripyat, but five minutes' walk from Elephant & Castle rather than hundreds of miles away in Ukraine.

I brought along Ulorin Vex, popular internet lady and also drawing artist. She wears many hats, although on this occasion she wasn't actually wearing any hats, not literal hats. It was freezing cold and she could have done with a hat. Perhaps another day. We both explored the Elephant & Castle shopping centre and we both used the toilets there, but at different times and for different purposes. She to change; me to pee.

The last time I did this I forgot to bring along a visible light camera for comparison, so this time I stuffed my 5D MkII into my backpack so that I can show you the difference between the reality of visible light and the fantasy world of The Beatles infrared. Here's what Ulorin looks like in visible light, with visible proof that it was cold:

Same outfit, similar location - surprisingly, despite being in a deserted tower block in London, it didn't smell of pee - but in infrared:

As before, I used a converted Canon 10D and a Canon 70-210mm f/4. This is an ancient EOS lens from the very early days of the system; it's one of the odd old lenses features on Mir.com, here, and stood out because it has a constant f/4 aperture. I tend to use it for infrared work because the camera's autofocus system was calibrated with this lens, and works properly, whereas other lenses are slightly off.

The technique is maddeningly inconsistent with people, and of course there's a distinctive zombified look. I find that whacking up the contrast helps greatly. Just in case there are any angiographers reading this, here's an eye:

The caption says it all

Eyes tend to look very dark in infrared, and whilst doing some research to find out why I stumbled on a scientific paper entitled Does the Earth have an Adaptive Infrared Iris?^[1] This put me in mind of the whole early-90s Terence McKenna "stoned ape" / X-Files / crop circles movement, and then I had a listen to the first minute or so of The Shamen's "Re:Evolution", and then I got bored and never worked out anything about the eyes thing. And now I am bored with this paragraph and so it must die.

Different outfit, similar location, same lens, visible light, standing in front of a metal grille that had an interesting texture:

As you can see, the infrared effect nullifies Ulorin's hair, which is one of her most striking features. A bit of a waste really. Still, my conclusions are that (a) pale-skinned people work in infrared (b) latex is not transparent in infrared, and tends to retain its shade (fabrics go all over the place) and (c) the Heygate Estate is well worth a visit. Take the kids.

And that is that. In the next post I'll probably go into some detail about the history of infrared imaging - it's yet another technology that was invented by the military and has since fallen into the hands of photographers, along with e.g. runway-cratering bombs, nerve gas, and high-explosive squash head tank ammunition, all of which appear regularly in the pages of Vogue.

Olympus 28mm f/3.5

Over the last few months I have amassed a bunch of old Olympus OM lenses. They are tiny, generally cheap, all of them are optically good, and they fit and work well on my Canon 5D MkII. Here they are:

They're sitting on an antique 12" vinyl record,which helps to give an indication of scale. Moving widdershins you can see an Olympus 21mm f/3.5, a 28mm f/3.5, a 50mm f/1.4 and a 50mm f/1.8. Mounted on the OM-10 is a 24mm f/2.8, plus the Winder 1 accessory and the manual shutter speed adapter. The 28mm f/3.5 is fitted with a generic OM/EOS adapter. My lens has a date code of E06, which means that it rolled off the production line in June 1980. Despite being thirty years old it is still in perfect working order, with no rattles or creaks. Countervailing is a great word, very manly and hard-sounding.

Almost as good as superabundance in that respect. If you're ever writing a report, be sure to put those two words in it. Also, speak truth to power and perfect storm. Try to put two or more of those in a single sentence, e.g. "It takes a brave man to speak truth to power against the Keynesian superabundance that has created a perfect storm". I digress.

In general, back in the day, Olympus sold two and sometimes three lenses in each focal length; slow and cheap, fast and expensive, and sometimes very fast and very expensive, as in the case of the 21mm f/2 or the super-effective 350mm f/2.8, and sometimes very slow and much cheaper, such as the 21mm f/3.5 or the 135mm f/3.5. Or for that matter the 28mm f/3.5, which is the subject of this post. They hover around £40 or so on eBay. The f/2.8 version sells for almost the same; it's more common, and the f/3.5 version has a bit of hype behind it. My gut instinct was that the slower lens would be sharper, because it isn't so highly-strung, although in practice it still needs to be stopped down for optimal performance. That said, it's no great sin to judge an f/3.5 lens at f/8, whereas it would be folly to emphasise the f/8 performance of a much faster lens. The f/3.5 is a carthorse, designed to pull things, whereas faster lenses are supposed to be sexy.

The f/3.5 was the standard budget wide angle for the first half of the OM system's life, during its most popular period, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and so there are loads available on the used market. Furthermore it has a very conservative specification. The 28mm focal length in general is wide but not eye-popping. Almost all standard zooms and most compact cameras have a 28mm setting - many even start at 24mm - and the chances that you don't already have a 28mm equivalent lens are very low (for crop-sensor cameras, it is the equivalent of a 17mm, 18mm kit lens). The 28mm f/3.5 isn't any faster than a kit lens. Some compact cameras even have faster, wider lenses. On a crop-sensor camera it becomes a very slow 44mm normal and doesn't make a lot of sense.

However, I don't have a crop-sensor camera. I have a full-frame camera, and I am always on the lookout for a full-frame wide angle lens that is sharp to the extreme corners at f/8. There are lots of full-frame 28mm lenses; not many of them are sharp to the extreme corners at f/8. The Canon 28mm f/2.8 I briefly owned wasn't and had a lot of CA. Surprisingly, the Carl Zeiss Contax 28mm f/2.8 Distagon wasn't either - it was hella sharp, just not in the extreme corners. That disappointed me a bit. Is the 28mm f/3.5 sharp to the etc? Let's find out.

Once more I venture to the piss-stinking, visually cancerous Culver Street car park, Salisbury, because it has sharp edges. Ten points if you can spot the used needles and used latex gloves in the images that follow. Here's what the vignetting looks like at f/3.5 (a fair amount) and then f/8 (not so much), shot with a 5D MkII:

Here's the bottom-right corner at f/3.5, no unsharp mask, with the contrast boosted so that you can see the wall clearly (this explains why there's noticeable chroma noise); click for full-size:

It's soft but at least consistently so. Compare with the same subject shot for my review of the Canon 28-70mm f/3.5-4.5 MkII, particularly the 28mm f/2.8 at f/8, which is sharp almost to the extreme corner but goes fuzzy in the last little bit. Here's the 28mm f/3.5 at f/5.6:

It's sharper but could be sharper still. And here it is at f/8:

It's sharp indeed, noticeably better than the Canon 28mm f/2.8 and the Canon 28-70mm f/3.5-4.5. With unsharp mask it actually becomes unnatural-looking, viz:

A Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 might well be sharper, and for £970 I should damn well hope so. The Olympus 28mm will however fit in a shirt pocket, which cannot be said of the 24-70mm. I have also heard good things of the manual focus Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AIS, but that will have to be another post, another day. The Olympus 28mm f/2.8 is also apparently good, but is it better than the f/3.5? I will have to find out.

For the sake of completeness, the image quality doesn't get any better f/11 and becomes slightly but noticeably softer at f/16, the narrowest aperture. I focused and shot with Live View, and used timed delay and a well-braced Gorillapod. Here's the full-size file at f/8, shot with a full-frame 5D MkII, converted with Canon Digital Photo Professional, sharpness +2 (click):



And here's a further comparison, taken from the right edge of the frame, f/3.5 at the top and f/8 at the bottom, auto-contrast. The f/3.5 image has a blurriness about it, although to be fair I can't actually see any more detail in the PRIVATE PARKING sign on the f/8 shot, it just looks sharper:

Here's what the CA looks like uncorrected at f/8:

It's not particularly visible in this worst-case scenario, and can easily be corrected with software. Here's a shot taken from the centre of the frame, at f/8, with unsharp mask:

I usually have a magic unsharp mask setting of REDACTED, but for this shot I toned the settings down a bit. The 5D MkII's files benefit from relatively aggressive sharpening but my secret settings were too sharp.

Conclusion and limitations
My conclusion is that the 28mm f/3.5 is sharp across the frame at f/8 on a 21mp Canon 5D MkII, and when corrected for CA, with unsharp mask applied, the image quality is definitive. That's all I ask for.

The 28mm f/3.5 has some limitations. It's really a bright daylight lens. At f/3.5 the viewfinder gets very dark in low light, especially if you are using a polarising filter. Live View is a godsend in this respect, but once you go indoors you will curse the lens. Furthermore, with a relatively narrow aperture, you will struggle to create narrow depth-of-field effects. On a more tangental level, the combination of narrow aperture and conservative focal length has the effect of nullifying some of the rationale behind carrying a large, bulky full-frame SLR; if you have to shoot at ISO 800 all the time, and all your images are sharp across the frame with near-infinite depth of field, you'll start to wonder why you didn't use a Micro Four Thirds camera instead.

Postscript
It is often opined that a full-frame camera is a money sink, because the only good full-frame lenses cost a fortune; this is not the case if you're prepared to put up with manual focus and you can do without f/2.8. A kit consisting of the Olympus 28mm f/3.5, 50mm f/1.8, and an OM-fitting Vivitar 70-150mm f/3.8 will go a long way and will cost less than a hundred pounds. God bless thirty years of depreciation. Depreciation has hit the OM surprisingly hard. It never had a romantic element; it never had a mythos, it was too new and modern for legends to grow around it, and it was never sent into the world's warzones and trouble spots. As a consequence the lenses are reasonably priced on the used market, because they haven't been hyped up by passion. A few still command a high price on account of their still-impressive specification; the 21mm f/2 mentioned earlier, and also a late-period 35-80mm f/2.8 zoom.

I can only find one proper test of the 28mm f/3.5, at SLRLensReview, here. They come to the same conclusion as me, and they go on to point out that the 28mm f/2.8 and 28mm f/2 are very similar in the same aperture range. The 28mm f/2.8 is fairly common and is probably the best option of the three 28mms, so if you see one cheap, snap it up.

NB In common with most other old manual lenses, the OM system can be adapted easily to Canon's EOS SLRs with a simple metal ring. Olympus sells an OM adapter for the Four Thirds / Micro Four Thirds system, albeit that this incurs a 2x focal length multiplier (you'd be much better off buying the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7). Judging by this handy table of lens registration distances, an OM-Sigma SA adapter might be possible assuming the SA mount is physically large enough.

Apart from that, any adapters would have to involve an optical element on account of the different lens registration distances. There is an OM-Sony Alpha adapter which works on this principle although it is apparently only suitable for telephoto lenses if you use a full-frame Alpha. I have never seen a Nikon-OM or Pentax-OM adapter. I surmise that you'd have to dismantle and modify either the lens or the camera mount to fit an OM lens to these systems, and it wouldn't be worth it. Nikon and Pentax both have a rich legacy of old primes, stretching back decades. As a Canon user, part of the appeal of lenses from the distant past is that the EOS system doesn't have a rich legacy of old primes; it only goes back to 1987, a time when plastic zooms were in the ascendant.

EDIT:
Since writing the above I bought a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8, which seems to get good reviews. In my experience it's sharp in the middle at f/2.8 and decent in the corners stopped down, but the Olympus 28mm is sharper. On an APS-C camera it would be very good, albeit with the same odd range as the Canon 28-70mm f/3.5-4.5 I wrote about earlier in the year. Unlike the Canon lens it's usable wide open, and so at 75mm, f/2.8 (roughly 120mm in APS-C terms) it would be handy for portraits, and indeed it seems to be very popular for this reason. Paired with (say) a Sigma 8-16mm you'd have a good general-purpose APS-C kit, with a bit of a gap at the moderate wide end. It focuses very closely as well.

I did a rough comparison by pointing the camera out of a window, hand-held. Here's the scene:

Here's the middle of the frame, Tamron at the top and Olympus at the bottom, both at f/8, a 100% crop with the same 0, 0.5, 150 unsharp mask setting and the same daylight colour balance (but no corrections for distortion or CA):

They're basically the same. Here's the edge of the APS-C frame, Tamron at the top and Jack Palance at the bottom:

They're very similar, although the Tamron lens has more CA and isn't quite as sharp as the Olympus lens (which also has some CA, but not as much). Here's the extreme bottom-right corner, Tamron at the top and Olympus at the bottom:

The Tamron lens puts up a valiant performance but gives up at the extreme corner, at least in terms of resolution. For a zoom lens it's not bad; distortion is low and the colours are nice. The Olympus lens resolves more detail but the colours are a bit washed-out, although this can be corrected with software. And it has to be said that in real life, when sized down or printed out, people aren't going to care that a tiny patch in the extreme corners is blurry. Unfortunately this isn't real life any more. It's 2010, we've moved beyond that.

Here are some pots, just to the left above the above crop:

Again the Olympus lens resolves more, but the Tamron lens is close behind. I surmise that on an APS-H camera it would also be pretty good, if you happen to have an old Canon 1D lying around doing nothing.

Infrared I: Outseeing a Snail

Today you will read about infrared photography. I have explored this topic before, with a modified Kodak DCS 560 - see here and here -but that was a kludgy way of going about things. I have since bought a Canon 10D and had it modified to shoot infrared, and you are looking at the results. I will go into the technical nitty-gritty in part II. In part I, self-indulgent philosophical waffle.

Luella Ruth and a resident of the CrossBones graveyard, Southwark

Less than Zero
The human vision system really isn't very good. You might be impressed with your eyesight but you're wrong. You can only see one small portion of the visible spectrum and only reliably during daylight hours. Cats can see better than you. Think about that. Cats.

And pigeons. I don't care how tough you are, if you're trapped in a dark wood at night and you're surrounded by hungry, enraged cats, they will see you before you see them and then you will be their plaything. If you're out in the open you will be stalked by eagles. Without guns, the human race would cower in fear on a planet dominated by cats and birds - and sharks, in the oceans - and it is for this reason that guns are so important. Other human beings are not the enemy. They are your allies. Yes, you can outsee a snail, but snails aren't likely to prey on you, at least not until the other animals have killed you first.

At least, I assume you can outsee a snail. I don't know much about snail vision. They have a very keen sense of smell and are of course very touchy-feely, on account of having a giant slippery foot that extends the whole length of their body. They like to slither on things and touch them. Snails are amongst the sexiest creatures on earth for this reason. They slither on things and touch them. Unlike lobsters, for example, who do not caress.

I mention birds, because not only can they see tiny objects from a great distance, they can see outside the visible spectrum. They can see ultraviolet and infrared, which are off the top and bottom of the spectrum respectively. The electromagnetic spectrum extends to X-rays and gamma rays in the ultraviolet direction, and microwaves and radio at the infrared end. All of these wavelengths exist around you, but you cannot see them because you are blind, relatively speaking. When people talk about the beauty of nature they are mistaken, because nature does not restrict itself to visible light. It goes beyond; plants communicate with bees in the ultraviolet spectrum, and snakes stalk their prey at night with infrared. The human vision system is not fit for the task of appreciating the natural world.

Changing topic slightly, here's a flower photographed with visible light:

The same image is also part of my article about the venerable old Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5. Here's the same flower - not the exact same flower, but part of the same plant - shot with an infrared camera:

It's spooky, ghostly, but not nearly as vivid. If I had shot it with an ultraviolet camera it would probably have lots of pretty patterns that are invisible with the naked eye, but I didn't. Here's a balloon (and some dust spots!), also shot with infrared:

"Here's A Balloon" would be a good name for a punk album, I reckon.

Still, where the human body fails, technology succeeds. When our eyes fail we see the world through glasses, and when we need to see the unseeable we invent machines that will do it for us. We have even invented machines that can see straight through a woman's clothing. There is no end to our inventiveness.

Sinful and Mammoth Beyond the Fog
Infrared photography came into being during the film era, long before you or I were born. It is one of those things that dates back to at least the early 1800s, although no doubt someone will argue that it was actually discovered in 1783, and then by Leonard Da Vinci in the late 1400s, and then by the ancient Akkadians and so forth. In the modern era it is one of those things that grew from the military-industrial complex, originally as a means of seeing through camouflage paint from the air. Like so many products of the military-industrial complex, such as the digital camera and the electric guitar, it quickly made its way to the general public and then bloggers, such as myself.

During the film era, infrared photography was tricky. Photography itself was tricky, infrared photography doubly so. Triply so. The photographer had to buy special infrared film, which was sensitive to infrared and also a bit sensitive to visible light, so he had to stick a deep red filter on the lens in order to block out the visible light, which meant that if he was using an SLR - and not for example a rangefinder - he couldn't see anything through the viewfinder, so he had to focus first and then screw the filter onto the lens and take the shot blind, or use zone focus.

To further complicate matters, infrared light does not focus at the exact same distance as visible light, and so Mr Infrared Photographer had to apply a focus offset, because the view through the finder was misleading. Old lenses often have a little red dot that shows how much and in which direction the manual focus ring should be turned in order to focus properly in infrared, although this kind of thing died out as autofocus zooms became the standard photographic tool; zoom lenses need a different infrared mark for each focal length setting, and because infrared photography is such a niche pursuit, manufacturers decided to save money on paint and leave the marks off. Nowadays only posh lenses tend to have infrared focus marks; they have almost become a mark of poshness. The widespread adoption of autofocus has however had a positive effect, because the camera's autofocus system can be recalibrated to focus properly in infrared, and indeed this is how I shot all of the portaits in this article, with a cheap old Canon telephoto zoom. The landscape shots were taken with a wide angle prime lens stopped down to f/11, at the infinity focus mark.

This is what an elephant would look like if you were a snake.

Still, infrared photography of human beings in the film era was tricky, unless the photographer made sure that the subject was posed at a certain distance, or he stopped down to f/16 or something similar. This is not mentioning the problems of correct exposure when shooting with IR, and the difficulty of retouching veins. Subcutaneous blood vessels show through skin in infrared, which makes healthy human beings look like week-old corpses. Hair looks funny too on account of the chemicals that people put in it.

Seeking Shelter Beneath the Sky
Infrared photograph is technically fascinating and the results are often striking. It makes the real world look exciting again. The flat boring landscape of southern England becomes a stunning panorama of science fiction beauty when photographed with infrared, because infrared photographs do not look like reality. They are more interesting than that. They are novel, and photography is really all about novelty. It was originally a novelty and has thrived on novelty ever since. There was a time when people were fascinated by any photograph of anything, because photography itself was a novelty; but over time the novelty wore off, and the photographs had to be more dramatic in order to capture people's attention and also money. Well-lit shots of boring fields became dramatic shots of mountain peaks lit by the last rays of the sun, which in turn became HDR panoramas shot from balloons, augmented with CGI, and with the rise of video-equipped digital SLRs the photographs have to have timelapse clouds, and in the future photographs will be in 3D and we will probably inject them straight into our eyeballs, or holes in our necks, or wirelessly to a receiver in our hypothalamus.

The same is true of naked women. The novelty, I mean, not the injecting into holes in our necks. There was a time when men didn't care whether the naked woman in the picture was attractive or not. It was enough that she was naked and that the picture was a photograph and not a painting. Paintings are not sexy because they are not real, whereas photographs are real and thus sexy. Eventually men became bored of ordinary photographs of plain-looking women, and so the women had to be attractive, the photography more interesting; and then the women had to be super-attractive, with large and perfectly symmetrical breasts that did not droop, of a kind extremely rare in the natural world, and now we have a situation where the women are augmented with surgery to become superhuman, and the photographs of the augmented women are augmented with Photoshop. The photographs have become paintings again.

"Make sure your hands are clean and free of oil."
Where does this leave naked women? They are a natural resource like oil and diamonds, and like oil and diamonds they are unattractive in their natural state. They must be refined and cut and polished. The same is true of music and cattle and fruit and metal and everything in this world. The natural order is tedious and mundane because it is familiar. We grew up with it, it is part of us and we hate ourselves.

Infrared photography is the kind of novelty that is a magnet for bloggers and photography enthusiasts. It's interesting enough to be interesting; it's not too expensive that it's out of reach; there is a sufficient research material to generate a short series of blog posts; it is a good way of giving the blogger's holiday snaps some meaning. For this reason I am once again conflicted. I want to do something new and different, but a blog post about infrared photograph is a poor way of going about that, because the party already has guests and I am late to it. However most blog posts about infrared are illustrated with the same cliched views of fields and trees, and I have something more than that; I have women.

Such as the lovely Luella Ruth who is in some of the images in this post and (cross fingers) the equally lovely Ulorin Vex (cross toes) if all goes well (genuflects). Meanwhile here are some fields and trees and some farm equipment and a hedge:

Off the top of my head* I can think of two famous infrared photographs, no more than that. The cover of U2's 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire; a photograph of Bob Dylan taken in 1968 by Elliot Landy. The list of famous photographers who did not make their names with infrared film is long and storied. Infrared film doesn't lend itself to operating in a war zone, and is generally inappropriate for news photography, and it doesn't appeal to the kind of romantic photographers that the general public enjoy, and so it remains a technical novelty. Infrared photography is the kind of thing that mesmerises technicians, and technicians do not generally capture the imagination of the public. Technicians rule the world; they do not rule people's hearts.

* A reader points out Weegee, the pioneering New York pap-o-crime-atographer from the 1940s, who shot necking couples in movie theaters using infrared film and infrared flashbulbs. There's an example here at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. With this technique he could photograph people without them knowing about it; the same basic principle was quickly adopted by the military for use by snipers and tank gunners, although the military used early video tubes rather than still film. More of this in part two. The reason Weegee didn't pop off the top of my head is that I'm British; Weegee isn't part of my culture. He's one of those American photographers. From America. Like Ansel Adams and the other one. I have heard the names, but they aren't part of me.

In part two I will start to get to the point, and explain who I took all these images - and more - and in which order.