Customer Story – How Jonathan Harper Photographs Cars in Unique Ways

If there was ever a type of camera that you could clearly define as a niche product, it would probably be infrared converted cameras. While very neat from a technological perspective, they don’t get a lot of use in the professional photography world. When you think of infrared photography, you likely think about ghostly colors on top of landscape backdrops, but when put into the right hands, infrared photography can show us spectacular color palettes that a traditional camera wouldn’t be able to catch easily. This particularly holds true with automotive photographer Jonathan Harper. I had the opportunity to page through some of his work and discuss his experience using infrared cameras, specialized filters, and unique tools to set his work different from his colleagues.

Infrared photography blended with automotive photography makes a lot of sense when you start to think about it. For one, automobile paint jobs are immensely complicated. Especially with luxury and exotic cars, many times the paint jobs require several coats of semi-translucent paint to create the depth that can be seen on some vehicles. And unlike traditional paint, automobile paint often uses glitters, flakes, and iridescents to really bring unique colors, and color shifts to a paint job. Secondly, a lot of automotive photography is taking photos of beautiful cars in beautiful locations – locations that would make great landscape photographs otherwise. But the complex paint jobs done for cars and locations isn’t what got Jonathan Harper into automotive photography, but rather, his love for cars themselves. Jonathan tells us — “I first got into automotive photography around 2011 when I was working at the Classic Car Club Manhattan. I was a car-obsessed 22-year-old intern fresh out of college. I was living in my parent’s apartment and just trying to figure everything out. One day a photographer and journalist showed up first thing at the garage and picked up a brand new press car that had been delivered the day before. They were gone all day, and came back sunburned and wind-worn, obviously having had an amazing day. At that moment, something clicked, and I realized that photographers and journalists get access to the newest, most fun cars, in the most beautiful locations, and they get paid to do it. So started my photography journey.”

However, what really separates Jonathan’s work is his use of rich beautiful colors, which is achieved through some specialized tools, one of them being a camera converted to Infrared – so let’s briefly talk about how IR cameras work. A traditional camera will have a filter stacked on the sensor called a low-pass filter – which essentially blurs the image slightly, to help prevent things like moire on tight patterns. Converting a camera to IR means replacing that low-pass filter with an infrared filter (usually a 720nm infrared filter). So instead of capturing three different colors of visible light, the camera now sees three different wavelengths in the near-infrared spectrum. So while an IR-converted camera won’t work like a thermal camera would (detecting heat wavelengths), it will provide a unique color spectrum to your images – particularly in natural light settings. When done well, it can provide far more vibrancy from colors that a traditional camera might not pick up.

Jonathan came to discover this technique through his friend Richard Thompson – another talented automotive photographer. As Jonathan tells us – “In all honestly I was inspired to pick up Full Spectrum / Infrared photography by another automotive shooter and now friend named Richard Thompson. He had been messing around with and posting automotive infrared work for many years before I embarked on my first conversion. I had my very first full-frame camera collecting dust in the closet. It had been a backup but then became a backup to the backup as sensor tech advanced. I sent it off to Kolari Vision for a Full Spectrum conversion, and within a few weeks, I had it back and began to experiment. It took a few months to dial in the look I liked, and a little longer to understand the effects of colored filters on the Full Spectrum conversion. Most of what I do now is shot through an IR Chrome screw-on filter, which is essentially just a heavy blue tint. This allows the foliage to come through red / orange and the true paint color of a car to remain somewhat true.”

“I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface with this blue filter, especially knowing I have a bin full of colored filters inherited from the late father of a college friend. If you’ve ever had the tiniest bit of curiosity for IR photography, I highly recommend spending a few hundred dollars and having a camera converted. Kolari also sells pre-converted cameras on their website, in fact, my original Sony A7 might still be there since I traded it towards the cost of my latest Full Spectrum body, a Sony A7R2. I mainly keep a Sony Zeiss 35mm f/2.8 mounted on the Full Spectrum camera, but recently also purchased the IR Chrome filter for my Sony 70-200 F/4 G. Having my preferred filter setup on a lens I love but have never shot IR with gives me that new gear tingle without actually having to buy any new lenses, which is fun.”

But just having an IR-converted camera isn’t all you need to capture these incredible colors in camera. Jonathan has a large set of tools to help him get these fantastic colors. Jonathan tells us — “In order to get the effect I currently go for, it’s necessary to have both a Full spectrum or IR converted camera (similar process and cost) as well as the screw on “IR Chrome” aka blue filter. Once you have a converted camera there are different achievable looks with different screw-on filters, ie red, yellow, or blue. You can then manually adjust the white balance on your converted camera to find some really wild ways the full spectrum and infrared light affects organic material, that’s the fun of experimenting with this. I chose to have my camera converted to Full Spectrum which offers a wider range of filterable looks, whereas an IR-only conversion locks you into a more specific color palette. That said, with the amount of data contained in a Sony RAW image, the possibilities are endless once you start fiddling around in Photoshop.”

When it comes to creating this style of work, it takes a lot of trial and error, as there are not many people who do this kind of work. Jonathan explains – “In terms of using Full Spectrum/IR for automotive, there’s not really much out there in terms of resources. I basically just saw what Richard Thompson was doing and said to myself, damn, I need that in my life. And then it still took the commitment and cost to have Kolari Vision permanently convert the sensor on one of my cameras, plus about a year of fiddling with it on weekends before I really felt like I was in a place where I could confidently share my work.  I’m my own harshest critic, and that can hold me back sometimes. Shooting Full Spectrum/IR is so fun because there’s an invisible world of color all around us, we just need the right tools to unlock it.”

What do you think of Jonathan Harper’s work? Check out some more of his automotive work on his website and Instagram. If you are interested in trying IR photography, we have a large selection of IR-converted cameras in our rental inventory. Thanks for reading!

Author: Lensrentals

Articles written by the entire editorial and technical staff at LensRentals.com. These articles are for when there is more than one author for the entire post, and are written as a community effort.