In July 1998, on a road-trip from Birmingham, Alabama to Nashville, Tennessee, I stopped the car in front of a tiny cafe in a small town and went inside for a late lunch. Norma Jean's Restaurant was deserted except for a little TV and dozens of baseball caps hanging on the wall. Norma Jean made me an omelette, and after I finished eating, I went out to retrieve my tripod & camera from the car. Up 'til that point I had never focused on roadside Americana, I didn't really shoot on a tripod, and I rarely shot interiors. My previous infrared photos were mostly hand-held, exteriors. That all changed that day, and my first serious, focused, body of work began; I blame that delicious omelette.

Flashback eleven years. In 1987 I was a 'photo-sponge'. After high school I worked at a tiny camera store, and since I lived with my parents, I spent all my pay on cameras, and developers, and lenses, and every colored filter known to man. I bought every film in the fridge to test so that I would know which one was the best. (Everyone always wants the 'best' film and I was determined to know which one it was.) Then one day I unearthed a roll of Kodak High Speed Infrared film... It sounded so covert, sort of like the CIA's favorite film. I bought and shot a roll. It was probably overexposed and unprintable because I didn't realize that I needed a red filter. I decided to buy another roll, read the instructions and try again because if James Bond can use it, then bloody well so could I. It was that second roll or maybe the third that finally yielded a proper exposure. Though it's not an amazing photo. I keep the 8x10 of that shot, dry-mounted to a community college matt board in my workshop box, and I show it when I do workshops to illustrate that my infrared has evolved since my first attempts in 1987. Want to venture a guess what the subject of that first photo was? It's one of the infrared classics; a puffy white tree in a landscape, complete with clouds in a black sky. Like so many other photographers that are addicted to seeing the invisible, that puffy tree flicked the switch in me, and for twenty-some years I've been inspired by the poetry of infrared light for all my personal work.

I've looked back over my work from the first few rolls of infrared that I decided to print, and lo and behold, I see the same things that I see in student portfolios. The same trees and graveyards, the same black skies (extra credit for puffy clouds), and the same landscapes with lots of plants, all shot on bright sunny days. Many have tried a roll of infrared using the prevailing wisdom or a magazine article as a guide, with lists of always-dos and never-dos: always use a tripod, never shoot into the sun, always use f22 or smaller, always bracket 4 stops, never leave film in the camera, keep your film on ice, wear a radiation-suit when exposing Infrared (Ok, I made the last one up - but it's not rocket science). I'll be upfront - infrared film was and still is, quirky - it's part of the famous infrared learning curve. The process is just like the first roll of film you exposed - you had no idea what you were going to get, then you figured out a system, now you feel comfortable exposing regular films. Then, along comes a film that doesn't follow standard rules and begins the learning curve all over. Its no surprise that people shoot things that are unusual and unique, however after a few rolls of film it's easy to start to get overwhelmed with 'glowing trees.' In critiques I've noticed after the fourth or fifth roll, I start to see style develop as the trees, clouds and "infrared look" start to give way to content and vision. Soon the work looks less like cliche infrared shots and more like fine art photography that just happens to be exposed on a film sensitive to invisible light. I take great pleasure in oversimplifying things, so I'll begin with my view of photographers... there are three categories:

1. Haven't shot infrared because it sounds too complicated
2. Shot IR but it looked like crap and was a pain in the butt, so they never shot it again
3. Shot IR and found that the pain in the butt was offset by the wild and wonderful images that could be created with infrared light.