An exercise with the company title

We present some results from our investigation into color photography.

One way of being creative, or at least sounding original, is to take something common in one field and applying it to another.  In general this is harder than it used to be, since each subfield has grown more and more complex and difficult to master, so that those who can understand two of them are rarer.  But we’ve been giving it a try, connecting astronomy with Earthbound photography.

Our astronomer is used to taking pictures through various filters and interpreting the results scientifically.  One common way to characterize a star is to measure its light in the ultraviolet, blue, green, red and infrared.  Applied to a cluster of stars, maybe with nebulosity, constructing color images from these filters can be useful indeed.  He wondered what a scene on Earth would look like, treated the same way.  Our recently-posted gallery of Synthesized Color photographs begins to give the answer.

Initially, of course, there was the simply technical question of how to get the exposure and focus right for light we couldn’t see, then developing the method for constructing pictures out of our images.  (Much of the background for this can be found in our “Capturing Color in Photography” essay.)  One disappointment was that, since our eyes have only three color receptors, putting together more than three colors at a time didn’t really add anything to the picture.  Instead, we produce a normal blue-green-red picture and then flank it with an ultraviolet-blue-green one of the same scene on one side, a green-red-infrared one on the other.

We expected certain things to happen, and by and large they have.  Living vegetation glows strongly in the infrared, and clear skies become very dark; ultraviolet scatters strongly in the atmosphere.  However, we haven’t yet found any obvious new scientific conclusions to be drawn from our exercise.

So we have ventured, cautiously, into the aesthetics of our technique, for which we have little formal training but an abilding interest.  Our five-color world is sometimes very strange, with red trees and deep blue skies.  But other times differences are rather subtle.  Old wood pilings, for instance, and stone take on different tints, any of which can look normal.  Deep shadows never seem to be quite the right shade.  If the shadow of a tree-branch moves between exposures, we can get an interesting feathering of cyan-magenta-yellow.

And taking separate pictures can produce a surrealism, as things that move (notably people) appear as ghosts in bright primary colors, while anything stationary looks quite normal.  This connection of time with color is something we’ve also explored with three-color work (much easier to carry out!).

We invite you to take a look at the new galleries and see what they look like to you.  We are very much interested in your comments.