Processing Infrared Images in Capture One

Click on any image to see it larger (If you are on a PC at least).

Introduction

Capture One is generally thought to not be a very capable infrared editor though as I will show, this is not the case. I will also briefly touch on processing in Photoshop and Lightroom.

This is a technical post that is mainly of interest to those shooting infrared, or contemplating doing so, and also processing in Capture One, or contemplating doing so. Others might skim down to see the processes of image transformation without bothering to contemplate the details of how it is done.

I have more information on what infrared is all about in my previous post Introduction to Infrared Photography. Processing is particularly important to most forms of digital infrared photography, particularly where you are starting with a colour image.

Taking Infrared Images

The wavelength of visible light ranges from 400 nanomentres (nm) (violet) to 750 nm (red). At less than 400nm there is ultraviolet light and at more than 750nm there is infrared, neither of which we can see. Digital cameras however, record colours from around 350nm to 1,000nm, more than we can see, and usually have “hot mirror filters” to block UV and IR light in the interests of recording more accurate colours.

You can take infrared images using either a filter over the lens or a converted camera in which a filter allowing infrared light to pass replaces the hot pass filter. I have a camera with a 560nm conversion, which allows bright colours and includes both visible light and infrared. The most common filter (and maybe conversion) is 720nm which admits less visible light and more infrared and has reduced colours. An 800nm filter or conversion is infrared only and produces a black and white image only.

An image from an 800nm filter may require little processing. For lower-nm filters, it is possible to use a custom white balance and maybe be satisfied with that, though much more is possible. I aim to transfer the image in post-processing so I don’t bother with a custom white balance and to aid that process I also shoot RAW.

Processing in Photoshop and Lightroom

A few years ago, Photoshop was the primary method of post-processing (and probably still is for most people). A key part of this was channel swapping, for example, swapping red and blue channels to get blue skies. You might also make other adjustments using layers for hue/saturation, black and white (with luminosity blending) and selective colour, and even get really complex with luminosity masking or the Orton Effect.

Using Lightroom for infrared images required generating and using a camera profile to extend the range of colours Lightroom sees. If processing in Photoshop, I would first make adjustments in Lightroom including changing the colour balance to maximise separation of colours. and might also make other adjustments including in the calibration tab and curves adjustments by colour channel. Only then would I launch to Photoshop from Lightroom. What you got your starting image to look like would affect the range of possibilities in Photoshop.

A year or two ago, Lightroom introduced Profiles and it became possible to export LUTs from Photoshop to become channel swapping profiles in Lightroom. So it is now possible to do your processing in Lightroom, though there is more capability in Photoshop. Rob Shea provides information on how to make your own Lightroom channel-swapping profiles or buy some from him.

Processing in Capture One

Unlike Lightroom, Capture One already has a full range of available colours for infrared processing without the need for a custom camera profile. However, it been seen as a not-so capable processor for infrared. Not so, as I will show you….

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This is how you might start out, an uncorrected image out of the camera (appearance will vary according to infrared filter).

This is what it looks like after moving sliders for colour temperature and tint to maximise colour separation, and after clicking Auto Adjust for levels.

(Click on images if you need to see more detail).

I have created several Editor presets in the colour editor, using a method as shown in this article. To create a red/blue colour swap preset, you make a selection for the red sector of the colour wheel. Then you change the hue four times by -30° for a total change of -30° (out of 360). That’s for the red shift. For the blue shift, you select an appropriate blue segment and move it four times by 30° to shift it to red. Then you save it as a custom preset. Once you have the custom preset, you can select it for an instant effect.

The red/blue colour swap works OK for this image. The equivalent of a Photoshop channel swap requires combining the red/blue colour swap with a cyan/yellow colour swap. These Color Editor presets also work on layers so it is possible to have different colour swaps or channel swaps on different layers and combine them using layer opacity.

The easiest way to create such custom presets is off an image of a photographic colour wheel. You use the colour picker tool in the Colour Editor (tiny yellow tool on the black background to bottom right of the destination colour wheel), adjust hue, unclick, reclick and repeat. Then you can see the colours change as you go. Its’s best to have only one colour change selected at a time or the results can get confusing.

I had to adjust the orientation of my colour editor segments a bit due to colour inaccuracy in the image I was using. Red and cyan should align around the horizontal axis, and the other coloujrs around the vertical axis.

So this is what I get after next clicking on my red blue swap preset in the Advanced tab of my Colour Editor.

Now the next thing is I want to change the yellow-green colour in the landscape. I could use the incremental change method as above but there’s an easier way.

Now we go to the Skin Tone tab of the Colour Editor. Use the picker to select the colour you want, in this case the foliage of the landscape. Adjust this if required. In the menu for the Colour Editor, select Create Masked layer from Selection. That creates a new layer with the foliage part of the landscape selected.

Now in the new layer just created, we go to the Skin Tone pane in the Colour Editor again. (We are going to change the “skin tone” of the foliage). The critical thing here is to have the Hue Uniformity slider all the way to the right, as shown. Then use the picker to select the desired colour again (in this case, the landscape foliage). Next, drag the selected segment in the colour wheel around to expand it from say 20° or 30° to nearly 360°. There’s a small handle, opposite the unselected segment and in this case at the bottom-left of the colour wheel. You can grab this and rotate the colour wheel, changing the colour to whatever you want. Since we are on a layer where only the foliage is selected, only that colour changes.

Note: Sometimes the mask on the new layer will have more than you want selected. If so, you may be able to erase the unwanted parts of the mask. If that doesn’t work, instead create a new filled layer and use the iterative hue-shift approach on the Advanced tab of the Colour Editor.

Now we have the landscape foliage colour changed.

The last thing I wanted to do was to change the colour of the foreground foliage of the small trees against the sky. I created another layer, copied the mask from the initial layer, erased all of the mask except for the small trees and then changed the colour. There were a number of ways I could have done this and I just used colour balance.

So this was the final image, also cropped a little further. I may have also made some other minor adjustments not specific to infrared.

There are many styles of infrared photography and if you are using a different filter or conversion to me, your range of possibilities may be quite different. I could also have processed this image in Capture One for quite different results.

I have related a few techniques here that may be useful for people using Capture One to interpret in their own way. Most people opt for a limited range of colours and perhaps minimal processing. All approaches are valid; it’s only what you end up with that counts no matter how much or little effort you put into it.

The next post will include twenty infrared images with a wide range of very different interpretations. They include the image from this post and are variously processed in Photoshop, Lightroom and Capture One.

Introduction to Infrared Photography

Jan9

1982 to 2022, various locations.

Links go to original posts. These are likely to be IR or Mono posts with little detail but there may be detailed information in a preceding normal-colour post. (Some images have no corresponding posts, so no link).

Click on any image to see it larger (If you are on a PC at least).

I’ve just finished posting on Istanbul/ Constantinople and next I will post on the Acropolis in Athens. First, this post.

I have upgraded my IR camera and am selling the old one so one purpose of this post is to provide information to a buyer who may not well understand IR photography. The IR explanation may be of general interest to photographers and others may just be interested in the images (there’s lots of text but also lots of images further down).

In ancient days of yore, decades ago, we had both colour and black & white infrared film. Colour infrared film seems all but unavailable now whereas there are a few avenues for B&W IR film.

Normal photographic colour film has layers of red, green and blue. Infrared light comes in below the red frequencies and ultraviolet is above blue, though ultraviolet is not relevant here. Infrared colour film had layers of infrared, red and green, and missed out the blue. Since infrared light is not visible, arbitrary colours were associated to the layers, so it was also called false-colour film. You could also change the colour combinations by putting colour filters on the end of the lens. This didn’t just add a colour caste but changed all the colours (since the infrared is invisible) and stacking filters changed all the colors in strange and mysterious ways.

Black and white infrared film was simply much more sensitive to infrared light. It was also very sensitive to visible light and had to be loaded and unloaded from the camera in total darkness. It was often grainy and could have an ethereal effect.

I never shot black & white infrared so I can’t show you any images of that but I did shoot colour IR. I must have quite a few processed colour IR rolls in my film drawers but I’ve scanned hardy any of them but I can show you one example.

Aboriginal Performance, Canberra, 1982.

This is a curious example. I was shooting an Aboriginal performance when I ran out of regular fim so I continued with infrared. Then, after I sent it to the lab to be processed, it came back with Sabattier Effect. They must have left the inspection port open in the processing machine so that created a partial reversal of the shadows – resulting in a negative audience. I had tried this myself several times but never got it to work as well as that.

Of course we now live in a digital age and we can take infrared images with digital cameras. This is not entirely equivalent to colour IR film – you would actually need to combine digital regular and IR images for that, but it offers lots of scope for artistic effects and experiments and can also work particularly well for monochromes.

St Kilda, 2013.

The cheapest way to take a digital IR image is to attach an R72 (or similar) filter to your cameras lens. (This works for most cameras but some have too strong an infrared-blocking filter.) This is how I took the above image and the next two.

Jarlshof, Shetland, 2013.

The problem with using an R72 filter is that it is almost opaque so you need to use a tripod (or extremely high ISO) and if you’re using a DSLR, you will need to have the filter off to focus and compose. A converted camera you can use hand held, just like a normal camera.

Manvar Desert Camp, Rajastan, India, 2014.

This image is to some extent reminiscent of IR b&w film which could have heavy grain but it does not include the characteristic ethereal blurring of highlights. I could have tried to replicate that with the Orton Effect in Photoshop but I have no interest in copying appearances from another era without a good reason.

Much more convenient than an R72 filter is an IR camera but it is more expensive as you have to send a camera off to get converted. Mirrorless cameras are more suitable than DSLRs (unless you just plan to use live view) because focusing has a separate sensor to taking the image and they may get out of synch.

Most people use a custom camera white balance, usually taken off foliage. Otherwise your captured image will start off different shades of a single colour. There can also be different kinds of conversions. A 720nm conversion gives you an image suitable for black and white with very little processing (perhaps even none, out of the camera). A conversion with a lower number such as 560nm or 590nm has more colour in the image and is suitable for either colour or B&W IR but requires processing.

Not all lenses are suitable for infrared photography. Many perform flawlessly but many have “hot spots”, a circle of diffusion and flare in the centre of the image. Some lenses are also OK at wider apertures but have hot spots when stopped down. There are a few guides to this online such as this one from Kolari or this one from Life Pixel, but you can also easily test your lenses yourself (with either an IR camera or R72 filter).

Processing is an important part of creating infrared images, though most people seem to take a relatively minimalist approach. So while I have generally taken a complex approach to processing using Lightroom and Photoshop, I decided to see what I might get with relatively quick processing just in Lightroom.

This is what you see in your camera without a custom profile or as the RAW file in Lightroom without any processing.

This is the change from applying a custom Lightroom profile made using the Adobe DNG Profile Editor, as described here, then making a few minor changes to Temperature and Tint. This is useful because Lightroom and Camera RAW by default give you a constricted colour range to play with for infrared images. It is not necessary for Capture One. This is similar to what you see in your camera with a custom profile there. (Actually I did not do this in processing this image but clicked the White Balance Selector on foliage instead. For this image, it provided a similar result.)

Beijing Garden, Canberra, 2022.

I created this just using Lightroom.

Apart from the custom white balance, I adjusted some hues in HSL, I played with some settings in Calibration, I optimised individual colour channels in curves, and I made some adjustments to shadows with colour grading. I’m not suggesting a recipe; I made some adjustments I thought appropriate at the time and I might do completely different things with a different image or at a different time.

This is the result of a quick B&W conversion in Lightroom. I usually do my conversions in CaptureOne and Photoshop is also powerful, though may be more complex.

Beijing Garden, Canberra, 2022.

This is another one from the same place on the next day. We’ll get to Photoshop soon and one of the things you do in Photoshop with infrared images is swapping channels. There’s a way to get a profile in Lightroom that does this so I was able to incorporate a red/blue channel swap in this image. Such a profile is complex to set up, though you can read of this process or purchase swap profiles here.

Ducks and Ducklings, Mt Ainslie, 2021.

This is an image from out the back of where I live, during a COVID lockdown. Processed entirely in Lightroom except for neutralising the colour of the water at the bottom in Photoshop, because even with recent Lightroom improvements, masking in Photoshop is much better (Capture One was also possible).

Carillon in early Spring, Canberra, 2021.

I recently tried processing infrared images in Capture One (which I have been also using for three years now). It has very powerful capabilities for adjusting colours and masking, and has layers. It’s better than Lightroom in many ways though channel swapping is not offered and Photoshop is more powerful for this purpose but can be much more complex. (However, channel swapping is possible. You can select, say, a blue 120 degree third, make the maximum -30 degrees hue shift four times, do the same for red (except +30) and save as a preset.)

The above image and the next two are processed in Capture One.

Bushland on Mount Ainslie, 2021.

Kangaroo on Mount Ainslie, 2021.

Kangaroos on Mount Ainslie, 2014.

This was one of the first images I took with my old IR camera. All the following images are from that camera and also half the preceding ones. The image you end up with is more important than the camera you take it with.

All images from the one above down were primarily processed in Photoshop.

Grand Canyon by Helicopter (IR), 2014.

Infrared is good for aerial images because it cuts through the haze, even before any processing.

Zion Canyon (Mono) (image is actually near Zion Canyon), 2014.

Infrared can also be good for monochrome. This was processed in Nik Silver Efex Pro but in the last couple of years I have gone to using Capture One.

Louisiana Bayou Monochromes, 2014.

IR can facilitate deep blacks and high drama in mono.

Louisiana Bayou Monochromes, 2014.

Photographing people can be interesting in infrared. Easier perhaps in mono; colour image can require delicate tweaking.

Maha’ulepu Heritage Trail, 2015.

All of these later images were mainly processed in Photoshop, but what you can do there depends on what you start with. It’s advantageous to process the images first in Lightroom (or ACR) and you can do this in a number of different ways which each led to a different set of possibilities in Photoshop.

Waimea Canyon and Na Pali Coast from Above (IR), 2015.

Though some people always process their images the same way, for me there is no set way of doing this, in Photoshop, or in Lightroom or Capture One. It seems as though each time I process an image I think of a new way to do it..

Taxi! Taxi!, 2015.

So I’m not providing any recipes because I don’t believe in them and don’t use them. The key is to look at the essence of each image and creatively explore its potential.

Kipahulu/ Haleakala National Park, 2015.

In Photoshop, the first thing to do is often channel swapping, usually red and blue channels. But there are lots of things you can do with channel swapping and you can also combine different effects with layers and masks.

Kipahulu/ Haleakala National Park, 2015.

Then I may use a Hue/ Saturation layer to adjust or change individual colours.

Oonartra Creek IR, 2015.

I may use a Black and White adjustment layer in luminosity mode to intensify individual colours.

Dream Lemurs, 2015.

I may make some tweaks with a Selective colour layer.

Ocean Harbour Dreaming, 2015.

I may also make a range of adjustments using luminosity masks (for which I use TK Actions though there are other alternatives that may be less complex).

Ocean Harbour Dreaming, 2015.

Of course, you don’t need to use the most complex method possible. Simple methods are fine if they work for you (and complex methods may not). I do think it’s important though to always be experimenting and learning….

Cazneau Tree, Brachina Gorge and Edowie ruins (IR), 2016.

There is potential technical complexity in processing infrared images but it will not work if it becomes just a technical exercise. It’s the image that you create that is important, not the process you used to create it. Whether you spend a lot of time doing complex things is ultimately irrelevant, the objective is simply to create Great Art.

Flinders Ranges Monos 3 IR, 2016.

Cazneau Tree, Brachina Gorge and Edowie ruins (IR), 2016.

Parachilna Ruins (IR), 2016.

Return to Adelaide (IR), 2016.

Yaxha and Topoxté (IR), 2016.

Tikal Monochromes, 2016.

Salton Sea (IR), 2016.

Salton Sea Monochromes, 2016.

Sculpture Garden, NGA, 2016.

KL to KK (Kuala Lumpur to Kota Kinabalu), 2019.

Mount Tamborine, 2021.

Ashoka (he’s actually a red Burmese), 2021.

I have deliberately refrained from giving detailed methodology and screen shots partly because the article would get too long but more because I think it’s counter-productive. There is no correct way of doing this and your own individual approach is for you to discover.

I will however, supply a couple of links for further reading. You can find more with web searches:

Joshua Tree National Park Monochromes

Jan31

5 October 2016, Joshua Tree National Park, California, USA.

Links go to colour posts (for more information and context). If an image does not have a link, the preceding one applies.

Click on any image to see it larger.

Agriculture in the desert to the north of the Salton Sea.

Cottonwood Spring and Teddybear Chollas.

Cottonwood Spring.

Joshua Tree National Park (IR).

Mountains and desert.

Cottonwood Spring and Teddybear Chollas.

Ocotillo and desert landscape.

Joshua Tree National Park (IR).

Desert landscape.

Teddy-bear Cholla.

Chollas.

Cottonwood Spring and Teddybear Chollas..

Desert landscape, possibly with Triffids.

Joshua Tree National Park (IR).

Jumbo Rocks.

Jumbo Rocks and Hidden Valley.

Joshua Tree.

Hidden Valley.

Coyote.

Rock climber.

Joshua Tree National Park (IR).

This was the last post of my expedition to Cuba & the Caribbean (Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, Dominican Republic, St Martin, Antigua, Jamaica, California). This has included over 2,500 images and more than 52,000 words. I have updated the index of all posts on this expedition which you can find here.

Next I will make a couple of local posts and then I will start on the final posts for my trip to Uzbekistan, Istanbul, Athens, Santorini, Crete, Andalusia, Washington and Oregon. That is the last trip for which I have not made final posts. I may not make any overseas trips until 2022 so those posts should keep me occupied for a while.

Salton Sea Monochromes

Jan23

1 to 5 October 2016, Salton Sea, California, USA.

Links go to colour posts (for more information and context). If an image does not have a link, the preceding one applies.

Click on any image to see it larger.

This car may be going cheap, though also not going at all.

Salton Sea (IR).

North shore palms.

Dead fish by an endangered sea.

Bombay Beach.

Salton Sea

Slab City.

Salton Sea (IR).

Salton Sea.

Mud Volcano.

Birds and Mud Volcanoes.

Hummingbird.

L.A. and Salton Sea Monochromes

Jan16

1 to 5 October 2016, Los Angeles and Salton Sea, USA.

Links go to colour posts (for more information and context). If an image does not have a link, the preceding one applies.

Click on any image to see it larger.

Colombian Mammoth (Mammathus Columbi)

La Brea Tar Pits.

Chest of drawers from the 18th century Japan.

Netsuke Gallery, LACMA.

Netsuke.

Buddha Shakyamuni, Sukothai, Thailand, 14th-15th century.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Eagle-headed demon (Assyria).

Borrego Palm Canyon.

Desert cacti, perhaps clavellina cholla.

Gomphothere.

Encounters with Megafauna.

A locust or grasshopper and a scorpion.

Ground sloths.

Chinese dragon.

Humans in vehicle.

Salton Sea.

Dead fish on the salt.

The end, but of what?

Near Salton City.

Salton Sea (IR).

Probably at Desert Shores.

Trees in the desert.

Joshua Tree National Park (IR)

Jan10

California USA, 3 October 2016

(Click on any image for a larger view).

We are in Cottonwood Spring in Joshua Tree National Park.

We see the autumnal yellow of the leaves and sometimes white leaves protesting against environmental indignities.

Deep in the grove is a fiery furnace of localised volcanic activity.

You can tell the person at bottom left comes from Colorado because he is turning yellow in sympathy with the leaves of the trees. This is due to long-term deciduous exposure.

The leaves become more orange as the day warms up.

… then more yellow due to a sudden cool breeze.

We’re now in the desert with the ocotillos..

The ancient spirit of a sky snake hangs in the sky.

The local authorities have helpfully planted a sign showing which way is up. This is puzzling for some.

You might have noticed it’s a desert and quite dry.

One day many years ago, triffids rained down.

But it was a desert and no good for them so they turned into teddybear chollas.

Because it’s so arid they usually don’t move much at all, except sometimes a little in the wind.

You might be tempted to cuddle up in bed with a nice teddybear cholla but beware, it might turn into a triffid.

We are now approaching Jumbo Rocks.

It’s much safer to cuddle up with a rock.

And here we have a Joshua Tree in full autumn colours.

in the foreground we have a Joshua Tree with an identity crisis, trying to be a palm.

The rocks are actually ancient fossilised Mojave Indian spirits.

We are now in Hidden Valley and this may be the headquarters of the Mojave spirits. They provide psychiatric assistance to Joshua Trees with identity crises

The plants here are all Joshua Trees. Some of them are very confused.

The spirit snakes are also very active in the sky in this area.

OK, these are all infrared images. So what does that mean? Well, human eyes have a range of visible colours that can be expressed as combinations of red, green and blue. Below that is infrared and above that is ultraviolet. Many animals see outside our spectral range. One of my cameras has a modified sensor that records infrared, red and green but not blue. (You can also do this with most normal digital cameras but it requires using an R72 filter and a tripod).

The image out of the camera is basically orange but this hides the potential for other colours. I then use software to hit the image with a virtual firehose to assign and modify colours. My last infrared post I processed using complex processes in Photoshop and I processed each image quite differently. Since the images in this post are more homogeneous, I decided to apply similar processing to them all. I used a more simple process just in Lightroom, though using channel-swap profiles I had created in Photoshop.

Jumbo Rocks and Hidden Valley

Jan1

California USA, 3 October 2016

(Click on any image for a larger view).

We continue further through Joshua Tree National Park.

The first half of images in this post are from Jumbo Rocks.

There is a campground nearby.

The rocks are granite, originally created many eons ago by volcanic eruptions and subsequently smoothed by water during immersion in an inland sea.

Not so much more to say so I’ll mainly let the images speak for themselves….

If you look closely, you might see a sign on the right. It is a Keep Out sign. This is after all a fragile desert environment. During the Government shutdown in 2019 and the early impact of COVID in 2020 when the rangers were absent but the park was still open, there were many instances of vandalism. These included illegal off-roading, creating new roads, cutting down the rare Joshua trees and excessive littering. The park was subsequently closed and hopefully better control will be maintained in future.

We have now moved on further and this is Hidden Valley, featuring here a magnificent specimen of a Joshua Tree.

If you look closely on the right side of the rock (perhaps you need to click on the image for a larger size) you will see there is a person climbing it and another below him.

A somewhat mangy coyote near the car park.

And back through the park and on a main road again.

For some reason, the images from this day (this post, the last one and the next one) have all been lost and recovered. Perhaps it is from when I had two disks in my PC and one in my Drobo backup fail in a week and found there was a hole in my backups. Though that would affect presumably more than one day. In any case, the images were all lost until I later realised it was possible to recover full-sized jpegs from Lightroom previews (using a Jeffrey Friedl plug-in).

Cottonwood Spring and Teddybear Chollas

Dec27

California USA, 3 October 2016

(Click on any image for a larger view).

Today we left Salton City and the Salton Sea, and headed north and slightly west to the Joshua Tree National Park.

We are still on the way there here. The Salton Sea is in the background to the south and this is a farming area where they are irrigating the desert, using water ultimately from the Colorado River.

Definitely desert, but also the lines of irrigation sprays.

This is nearby, the opposite side of the road facing north, not quite in Joshua Tree National Park as yet.

Now in Joshua Tree National Park, this is Cottonwood Springs, a strategic watering place for travellers in the nineteenth century.

I think this is probably the Great Basin Fence lizard.

You can see how large the California Palms are by the walker at bottom left. You may need to click to a larger image to see that properly.

Desert views inside Joshua Tree National Park.

An Ocotillo.

We stopped at a place near the road where many Teddy-bear Chollas (Cylindropuntia bigelovii) were growing.

Teddy-bear Chollas. Nice cuddy plants to curl up in bed with.

(More from Joshua Tree National Park in the next post).

Birds and Mud Volcanoes

Dec19

California USA, 2 October 2016

With Jeni Bate of Skyscapes for the Soul . ..

(Click on any image for a larger view).

We headed off for the southern end of the Salton Sea. On the way we encountered some chickens on the road.

Large black chickens with red heads.

… or turkey cultures, if you prefer.

Our first intended stop was the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge. These are probably sandhill cranes, flying overhead.

This is probably a great blue heron.

… with an egret or two out of focus in the background.

Not far from the wildlife refuge is an outcrop of small mud volcanoes.

This is a reminder of the San Andreas Fault and subterranean heat.

Not far away is the Elmore Geothermal Facility.

Normally I’d reduce this in size so images are roughly equal in area, but I’ll leave it as it is. We are at Calipatria, just south of the Salton Sea. We are at 56 metres below sea level (184 feet, or more than 30 fathoms). The top of the flag pole represents where the surface of the ocean would be if a fissure opened from the Gulf of California. I have read that it is a home-made construction and given that we are on or near the San Andreas Fault, one should not stand too close in the event of an earthquake.

We are now back at Salton City and I am photographing hummingbirds in Jeni’s back yard.

Black-chinned hummingbirds.

Slab City

Dec12

California USA, 1 October 2016

With Jeni Bate of Skyscapes for the Soul ..

(Click on any image for a larger view).

You may recall from the previous post that Leonard Knight, the creator of Salvation Mountain initially came to the nearby Slab City.

Currently we are in the desert between Salvation Mountain and Slab City but the sculptures belong more to Slab City than Salvation Mountain.

The more observant amongst you may notice some artistic differences in the style of the sculptures here as compared to Salvation Mountain.

The materials used can be somewhat different too.

It appears that cycling around in the desert may sometimes have been uncomfortable.

There’s a conundrum here. Is it a political statement, a sculpture or a theme park?

We are now in Slab City and the rows of bottles indicate boundaries for vehicles.

Before there was Slab City, there was Camp Dunlap.

This was a World War II military base, chosen for suitability for desert warfare training and proximity to San Diego. It opened in 1942 and ran for three years. By 1956 all the buildings had been removed but the concrete slabs they were built on remained.

It’s reasonable to assume the array of sculptures wasn’t created by the Army in the 1940s to give a sense of normalcy to their soldiers.

From the 1980s, people came to stay here. Originally there were “snowbirds”, seasonal refugees from the cold northern winter, taking advantage of the concrete slabs as a place to park a mobile home.

It has expanded to include artists, squatters, survivalists, people trying to escape and homeless people.

The population is around 4,000 during winter months and 150 during the summer. It is a harsh place to spend a summer. In the hottest four months June to September, maximum monthly temperature is likely to be around 50ºC (122ºF) and maximum daily temperatures are likely to be around 40ºC to 42ºC (103ºF to 107ºF).

There is no electricity, running water, sewers or rubbish services provided by government. There is also an absence of law enforcement, taxation or administration.

So it might sound like a libertarian paradise and it is self-styled as “the last free place”. Life must be hard for most of the people here though. In recent years there has been an increase in drug use (particularly chrystal meth), theft and rubbish build-up. Currently they are hiding out, closed to outsiders and trying to avoid COVID-19. Many or most of them will have no health insurance and be unable to afford a doctor or even transport to see one.

There are times when the light changes and an eerie glow descends over the area.

This might be the Earth trying to fight back and defend itself from commercial exploitation and Climate Change.

One might mistake it for the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse. But it is due to permeation by future ghosts of the wealthy political figures who are currently striving to overwhelm Democracy by propaganda and legal manœuvres and end up here, despised by other residents and bereft of personal resources.

Murray Foote

Category Archives: USA

Processing Infrared Images in Capture One

Introduction

Taking Infrared Images

Processing in Photoshop and Lightroom

Processing in Capture One

Introduction to Infrared Photography

Joshua Tree National Park Monochromes

Salton Sea Monochromes

L.A. and Salton Sea Monochromes

Joshua Tree National Park (IR)

Jumbo Rocks and Hidden Valley

Cottonwood Spring and Teddybear Chollas

Birds and Mud Volcanoes

Slab City