Abandoned Barn & Cattle Chute, Ashland OR

(c) Darlene Lyon Kruse, All Rights Reserved

Kodak made me do it. I fell in love with infrared photography in the early 1990s and had been shooting High-Speed Infrared Film (HIE) ever since. When Kodak announced it was discontinuing HIE, digital seemed like my only choice. But I went there kicking and screaming because I so loved the soft, surreal images that HIE gave me, and digital infrared has a sharpness that creates a different kind of image. I bought a dozen rolls of HIE before it was forever gone, though, and still have a couple of rolls in my refrigerator...and an Oregon source for developing them.

Abandoned Barn & Cattle Chute is on a farm across the street from where I live. The City of Ashland decided to develop the land, for affordable housing, much needed here. Talk about mixed feelings -- I loved photographing at this farm, now abandoned, but am also in favor of affordable housing. SO...I spent the summer of 2009 photographing over there almost everyday. A week after I made this photo, construction started. The farm was fenced off. Trees were trimmed, old outbuildings torn down. The barn is still there but no longer accessible.

This version of Abandoned Barn is actually a composite of two. When I looked at my images in the computer, I saw white PVC pipe laying along the fence, to the left of the cattle chute and not visible in this version. So I went back the next day and reframed my image. But...when I looked at it in the computer...NO CLOUDS. And the clouds are essential to the success of this image. For two days there were no clouds in the sky. And so I created a composite, using the clouds from the first image I made. I chose the sepia tone because it adds a vintage, romantic feeling that I felt while I was photographing the barn.

A bit about digital infrared: To make this image, I used a digital SLR that was converted by Life Pixel to capture infrared. A Nikon D50, my first digital SLR, my learner camera after 20 years of shooting film and reluctantly coming to digital. With the conversion, it became a dedicated camera, used only for infrared work.

Because of the calibration process when a camera is converted, images are sharper than those made with film. And unlike trying to shoot infrared with an unconverted digital SLR, exposure times are as they would be with a traditional digital SLR. (Exposure times for infrared using my unconverted D300, for example, were in the 50-60 second range.) Late summer/fall 2009 I lost my D50. After a winter of tearing my house, storage area, and car apart -- more than once -- and not finding it, and a spring of testing the unconverted D300, I finally accepted reality bought a new digital SLR. It's in Washington state right now, being converted by LifePixel. My new dedicated camera should be here this week (YIPPEE!), and I will be SO glad to be back in the infrared business again! It feeds a part of my creative self that nothing else does.

To see more infrared images, digital and film, check out my fine art gallery on my website.

Metadata: Nikon D50 converted SLR. Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 18,,. ISO 200. Exposure: 1/320" at f/11.