Seeing the world in a new light: how infrared photography can enhance your creativity

As a professional landscape and travel photographer, David Clapp frequently goes to locations around the world in search of strong images for his professional portfolio. He shoots, runs photographic tours and supplies canvas art companies with travel images for home décor. Some of the most valuable images in his portfolio in recent years have been shot in infrared.

For the British photographer, maximising his creativity now means taking two cameras: one for standard colour shots (most recently a Canon EOS R5) and the other for infrared photography (a converted Canon EOS RP). Here, he reveals his IR photography techniques.

Infrared photography, also known as IR photography, records wavelengths of light that are beyond the visible spectrum and creates otherworldly images where colours or tones are often completely different from what we see with 'normal' vision. It can create opportunities for striking images in unpromising situations.

"Colour relies so heavily on atmosphere and lighting conditions, but infrared can work at pretty much any time of day," says David. "You can photograph something that's very normal and everyday and turn it into something unique. It's given my work such a strong identity."

David has been a professional photographer since 2005, and infrared images have been part of his business for around 13 years. Until recently, he used two main methods for creating them. One was to shoot with an infrared filter attached to his lens, which blocked most or all of the visible light spectrum and meant exposures were very long.

"Shooting an outdoor scene in bright sunlight with a 720nm (nanometer) screw-on infrared filter would typically need a 30-second exposure," says David. "It looked ethereal with, for instance, clouds blurred because they had moved during the exposure, but at the same time it was impractical."

This enables David to use infrared filters of different wavelengths via the Canon Drop-In Filter Mount Adapter EF-EOS R. As the adapter is used for attaching EF lenses to an EOS R System body, it means David has to shoot with EF lenses. "I'm happy with that," he says. "There's no loss of performance quality when using the adapter and I don't feel the lenses I have are in any way a compromise for the style of work I'm doing."

Importantly, using the adapter not only enables him to create images with different infrared effects, it also allows him to shoot with the same exposure lengths and ISO settings as conventional photography.

David opted to use his Canon EOS RP for the full-spectrum conversion. "I'd used the EOS RP a lot as my everyday colour camera," he says. "For me, photography is primarily about the refinement of concepts and the exploration of ideas. The camera is there to capture that exploration. It shoots 26MP images and it's compact and understated. Having something small that people hardly notice is important to me when I travel. So when I went down the infrared route, this was the camera I chose."

For a 2022 trip to Vietnam, David shot infrared images on his converted Canon EOS RP and colour photographs on a Canon EOS R5. Starting in Hanoi and moving on to four other cities including Ho Chi Minh, David shot a mixture of landscapes, architecture, street scenes and street portraits.

Filters for infrared photography start at a wavelength of around 450nm and extend to 840nm. David chose to take three infrared filters on the trip. One was a 590nm filter, which allows more visible light to reach the sensor and creates colourful infrared images with golden yellow foliage and bright blue skies when processed (channel swapped) in software.

David's conventional colour images, shot on the Canon EOS R5, included textural landscapes of rice terraces and street portraits. He particularly valued the camera's autofocusing accuracy and speed, as well as its image stabilisation. "It was absolutely brilliant," he says. "I only had to use my tripod once on the entire trip – I was that confident about shooting sharp pictures without it, even in evening and dawn light.

"The Face Tracking feature is absolutely fantastic for pictures of people, even when they are children moving erratically. For example, I was taking portraits of a young boy swinging back and forward on a hammock. Using AI Servo AF in conjunction with Face Tracking, the focus locked on to his head and gave me the option of which eye to choose. The shots were sharp and detailed. This feature was a game-changer for me."

Conventional colour images still hold plenty of interest and potential for David, but shooting with a range of infrared effects particularly excites him. While it's worth stressing that a full-spectrum conversion on your camera is not officially recommended by Canon, and that it's an irreversible procedure that will invalidate your warranty, for David it has opened the door to making different kinds of images.

"The freedom you get from shooting infrared in this way unlocks creativity and is so artistically liberating," he says. "As well as photographing with different infrared wavelengths, you can also, for example, shoot the same scene with different filters and blend them together. It opens your mind to think about the world in a completely different frequency, which then means you train yourself to look at the world in a totally unique way."

In addition to infrared photography, David is also planning to shoot with light that's on the ultraviolet spectrum (below 380nm) by using a UV-transmitting bandpass filter in his Canon Drop-In Filter Mount Adapter EF-EOS R. "I haven't experienced shooting with ultraviolet light yet, but I'm looking forward to trying it," he says. "When I'm using these different frequencies, the camera is utterly magical. It gives me limitless possibilities."