Smoke Gets in my Eyes

We had terrible air quality this morning, and several more fires started by afternoon. But there was a break of a few hours...

The morning started with really bad air quality and lots of smoke - the Air Quality Index (AQI) was around 200. But a westerly breeze pushed most of that a few miles away from us in the mid-afternoon, and I headed out to try the new IQ4 camera with some of my lenses. This photograph shows the smoke building back in from new fires; the lower part of the mountain ins covered in smoke from a fire in Wilkeson, WA. The air in Graham, where I shot this from, was actually pretty clear, minor haze from the smoke.

The layers of smoke around Mt. Rainier are very clearly shown by the photo. I also took my infrared camera with me. (It has a sensor whose normal coatings have been stripped, and replaced with coatings that allow infrared light to pass through to the sensor.)

The photo above was taken with a 100mm medium-format lens (Rodenstock HR Digaraon-S, a 100mm f/4, equivalent to a 60mm lens in 35mm format). The photo below was taken with a special near infrared industrial lens made as a joint venture by Pentax/Cosmicar in Japan. Most of my normal lenses have problems with infrared imaging—there are reflections, hot spots, haze, etc. The industrial lens was made to handle both visual and near infrared cleanly, and it shows in the resulting photograph:

The obvious thing about an IR photograph is that the colors are all wrong; since infrared is just long wavelength light, it is neither red nor green nor blue—but the sensor’s pixels do slightly react differently to it, which creates false colors. I have played around with the result to make the snow on the mountain white, which makes the green vegetation look yellowish, and the sky is a dark slate gray. The smoke shows up as different colors in different locations; they could be a factor of sun angle off of the smoke particles, or something more sophisticated—I’m not sure.

But what is interesting is that the IR light is not scattered by the smoke nearly as much as white light is. So the details of the distant background show up more clearly. The Cosmicar/Pentax lens is a 35mm, f/2.8.

The IR image looks fairly alien, but I like the texture and clarity of it. The smoke around Mt. Rainier mostly reinforces the feeling of Armageddon we are in right now…it comes and goes, but it’s totally awful when you are breathing smoke. Getting out to take some photos is a wee bit of sanity in a crazy time.