:: gia’s blog ::

OK. So, I’ll explain the technique I used to take infrared photos with my mobile phone camera.

First, you need to check and see if your camera is sensitive to Infrared light. An easy way to check this is to point a remote control at your camera and press one of the buttons. If you see a light, your phone is sensitive to IR (to test whether or SLR is IR-sensitive you will have to take a photo).

Then, like Jasmine mentioned in the comments in my previous post you need to get two bits of exposed and developed film. Look through your old negatives for completely black bits. If you can’t find any do what I did and go to your local Snappy Snaps, buy a 24 exposure roll of 35mm film, pull it out of the cannister, the wind it back in, hand it over to the mildly bemused person behind the counter and ask for it to be developed, but not printed.

You then cover up the lens with *two* bits of black negative. This blocks out pretty much all visible light yet will let through infrared light. When you take a photo it will come out fairly red.

You need to open this in Photoshop (or some other photo software, but really why do you use anything other than Photoshop?) and simply auto adjust the levels.

Then go into the channel mixer and swap the red and blue channels- ie in the red channel make ‘red’ 0% and ‘blue’ 100%, in the blue channel make ‘blue’ 0% and ‘red’ 100%.

Then, if you want to intensify the colours, duplicate the layers and in your ‘layers’ window go to the dropdown menu which reads ‘Normal’ and change it to ‘Multiply’.

You can then go into Image>Adjustments>Levels and under the top window take the righthand triangle (the white one) and drag it left to a point at which you think the photo looks best. Et voila! An amazing-looking infrared photo from your mobile phone!

These past few days I’ve started taking some photos which have particularly excited me… with my mobile phone camera. Yep.

I’ve found out how to take… wait for it…. infrared photos with my Sony Ericsson mobile phone. It’s seriously cool. They do need a bit of Photoshop tarting (adjusting levels and contrast etc) as a mobile phone camera is really very point and shoot, but you have to admit the results are pretty amazing.

Normal photo:

Infrared photo untouched:

After adjusting the levels, colour channels and contrast:

More IR pics from Clapham Common:

Scary, evil, haunted-eyed child (ie my son in IR):

I’ll explain how to do it another day…