There is a version of every landscape that the human eye will never see. These photographs go looking for it.
That sentence opens Matthew Borowick's artist statement on his website, and it carries the weight of a decade spent in the invisible spectrum. The New York-based photographer moves between the earth and the sky, shooting from the ground and from drones, pursuing a single obsession: finding the moments when a landscape reveals something about itself that is only visible from exactly the right angle, altitude, or light.
The method he has developed a full-spectrum converted camera paired with an orange bandpass filter that blocks visible light entirely while exposing only infrared wavelengths has produced a body of work that sits somewhere between scientific instrument and spiritual meditation. Green vegetation becomes a burning amber. Surfaces that appear flat in conventional light reveal texture, depth, and presence. What reads at first as a color effect is, in practice, a different way of seeing.
"These are not altered images," Borowick has written. "They are accurate ones. Just not to the light you're used to."
The Discovery That Started Everything
To understand what Borowick is doing, it helps to begin with a British astronomer and a prism.
In 1800, William Herschel was studying the temperature of different colors in the light spectrum by shining sunlight through a glass prism and placing thermometers in each band of color. He noticed something unexpected: the temperature increased as he moved from violet toward red. But it kept rising beyond the visible red light into an area that appeared completely dark to his eyes.
Herschel had discovered infrared radiation though he called it "calorific rays." He realized that invisible light existed beyond the red end of the spectrum, carrying heat energy that could warm his thermometer even though no visible light was present. The scientific community initially struggled to accept his findings. Many believed light and heat were entirely separate phenomena that could not exist together.
Further experiments confirmed that infrared radiation behaved like visible light in many ways: it could be reflected, refracted, and absorbed, following similar optical principles. This laid the groundwork for eventually capturing infrared light photographically and for the distinctive aesthetic that would eventually captivate photographers more than a century later.
The Wood Effect and the Birth of a Genre
By the early twentieth century, photographers began experimenting with capturing infrared light on film. The technique remained largely scientific until the work of Robert W. Wood, the infrared photography pioneer whose name became attached to the genre's most recognizable visual signature: the so-called Wood effect.
The effect is immediately recognizable once you've seen it. In infrared photographs, green foliage glows white appearing almost like snow or mist while blue skies deepen to an almost black. Water becomes dark, clouds pop against the sky, and human skin takes on an unsettling smoothness. The world looks simultaneously familiar and deeply strange, as if glimpsed through a fever dream or remembered from a half-forgotten childhood.
The Wood effect, according to technical sources, is mainly caused by foliage strongly reflecting infrared in the same way visible light is reflected from snow. There is a small contribution from chlorophyll fluorescence, but this is marginal and not the real cause of the brightness seen in infrared photographs.
For landscape photographers, this effect transforms ordinary scenes into something ethereal. Ordinary forests become cathedral-like. Parks take on an otherworldly quality. The technique became popular among artistic photographers through the 1950s and 1960s, even as it found serious applications in scientific and military contexts.
From Battlefields to Farms: The Practical Origins
The military potential of infrared photography became apparent during World War II. Color-infrared film, developed during this period, was sensitive to both visible light and near-infrared light. Its major advantage was identifying healthy vegetation and, crucially, detecting camouflage. Cutters and painters attempting to disguise military installations with painted canvas and painted trees could be revealed because the artificial materials did not reflect infrared light the way living foliage does.
This same principle found peaceful applications after the war. As aerial photography expanded in the postwar decades, infrared film became an important tool for mapping forests and crops. The Library of Congress notes that the development of color photography and other specialized films expanded the range of applications for aerial photography in scientific and cartographic work.
The connection between infrared reflectance and plant health emerged from this military-to-civilian technology transfer. When green plants are photosynthetically active, they reflect a large amount of near-infrared light compared with visible light. In a color-infrared aerial image, healthy green vegetation appears red. Stressed or dying vegetation, which reflects less infrared, appears paler or even white. The camera becomes, in effect, a diagnostic instrument.
The discipline was developed further by the United States with the launching of the first Earth Resource Technology Satellite later renamed Landsat by NASA in 1972. Satellites provided a relatively inexpensive platform from which cameras could survey the earth on a regular basis, and computers provided the foundation for digital observation that eliminated the need for photographic film.
Matthew Borowick's Method: From Inspiration to Practice
Matthew Borowick describes his work as inspired by Kodak Aerochrome, the discontinued false-color infrared film that turned the natural world into something between a fever dream and a revelation. That film stock now legendary among photographers for its distinctive rendering of landscapes has been unavailable since the early 2000s, forcing photographers interested in similar effects to develop digital alternatives.
Borowick's solution involves a full-spectrum camera conversion. Standard digital cameras include a hot mirror that blocks infrared wavelengths from reaching the sensor, designed to approximate human vision. Removing this mirror allows the sensor to capture a broader spectrum of light. Paired with an orange bandpass filter, which blocks visible light entirely while allowing infrared wavelengths to pass through, the setup isolates precisely the wavelengths that reveal landscape health.
This approach differs from simply removing the hot mirror and shooting blind to all wavelengths. The bandpass filter acts as a precision instrument, selecting only the range of light that produces the characteristic effect. "The technique blocks visible light entirely, exposing only the infrared wavelengths that pass through foliage, atmosphere, and shadow in ways that daylight photography never captures," Borowick has explained.
The result is a file that, while requiring processing, does not involve the kind of artificial manipulation that defines much contemporary digital photography. The colors are real; they are simply not the colors the human eye typically perceives.
What Infrared Reveals About Landscape Health
The science behind infrared landscape photography rests on the behavior of chlorophyll. Plants absorb visible light for photosynthesis, but they reflect near-infrared light. This reflection is not merely an aesthetic curiosity it is a biological signal. The strength of infrared reflectance indicates how actively a plant is photosynthesizing, which in turn indicates its health and vigor.
For ecological monitoring and natural resource management, this has practical implications. Aerial photographs can serve as base layers in geographic information systems and be used for land planning, assessment, and monitoring, as well as creating soil maps. Color-infrared aerial photography is particularly valuable for studying rangeland health, where understanding vegetation patterns across large areas would otherwise require extensive ground surveys.
Aerial photos can also provide historical records for studying changes in land use, management, vegetation, or habitat. Comparing infrared images from different years can reveal forest health trends, agricultural stress, or the progression of invasive species information that would be invisible to conventional aerial photography or satellite imagery limited to visible wavelengths.
The transition from film to digital sensors has both advantages and limitations for this kind of analysis. Digital sensors are highly calibrated, allowing researchers to relate image values to measured quantities of radiation. Unlike digitized film images, which require scanning that generally reduces quality, digital aerial photographs can be directly integrated into quantitative analysis workflows.
The Photography of Diagnosis
What makes Borowick's work distinctive is not merely the technical method but the philosophical frame he places around it. By insisting that these images are "accurate" more than "altered," he invites a reconsideration of what photography is supposed to do.
"What reads at first as a color effect is, in practice, a different way of seeing, one that asks whether the world we photograph is the world that actually exists, or simply the one we've agreed to accept," he has written.
This question has practical stakes beyond aesthetics. If infrared photography reveals genuine information about landscape health that visible-light photography conceals, then the choice to photograph only in visible light becomes a choice to remain ignorant of certain truths about the world. The camera, in this framing, is not merely an artistic instrument but a diagnostic one.
For photographers working with aerial perspectives drones, aircraft, elevated positions the infrared spectrum adds a layer of interpretive information to the bird's-eye view. What appears as uniform green canopy in conventional photography may reveal hidden patterns of stress, disease, or water availability in infrared. The aerial perspective, already valuable for its overview, becomes doubly informative when extended beyond visible wavelengths.
Why This Matters for ElevatedPerceptions Readers
For readers researching practitioners, frameworks, and visual methods, Borowick's work represents a specific case study in how a photographer can develop a signature methodology grounded in technical understanding and artistic vision. The path from inspiration by discontinued film stock, through technical experimentation with camera conversion and filter selection, to a coherent body of work and a clear artistic statement offers a model for photographers seeking to develop distinctive approaches.
The broader context matters too. Infrared aerial photography has applications beyond art: ecological monitoring, agricultural assessment, environmental change detection, and land management all benefit from the ability to read landscape health through spectral signatures. Understanding this history and technique equips photographers to communicate more effectively with scientists, land managers, and environmental professionals who increasingly use remote sensing in their work.
For those working with aerial media specifically, Borowick's method demonstrates how the drone platform extends these capabilities. The ability to position a full-spectrum camera at precise altitudes and angles opens possibilities that satellite imagery cannot match, while the digital workflow provides the precision and repeatability that scientific analysis requires.
The Continuing Journey
The history of infrared photography spans over two centuries, from Herschel's serendipitous discovery in a British observatory to sophisticated digital sensors capturing distant galaxies. But the landscape version of this story continues to unfold. New camera technologies, improved processing workflows, and expanding drone platforms have lowered the barriers to entry while raising the potential for sophisticated work.
Photographers like Matthew Borowick occupy a particular position in this ongoing story: not primarily scientists, but not purely artists either. They use scientific instruments to create images that provoke aesthetic and philosophical responses. They ask questions that are simultaneously technical and existential. And they produce work that rewards both scientific attention and emotional engagement.
There is something magical about infrared photography. It reveals a world our eyes cannot see, transforming ordinary landscapes into ethereal scenes where green foliage glows white and blue skies turn dramatically dark. The question Borowick poses whether the world we photograph is the world that actually exists, or simply the one we've agreed to accept remains as urgent as ever, for photographers and for anyone who relies on images to understand the living world.
His method suggests an answer: the world that actually exists is larger than the one we've agreed to accept, and the camera can show us more of it, if we're willing to see differently.
Where to Read Further
Readers interested in exploring infrared photography's history and techniques may find the following resources valuable:
- Markus Hagner Photography's comprehensive history of infrared photography traces the technology from William Herschel's 1800 discovery through its military origins and artistic applications to contemporary digital implementations.
- Create! Magazine's profile of Matthew Borowick provides additional context on his artistic approach and full artist statement on his work with full-spectrum converted cameras.
- The Landscape Toolbox's guide to color-infrared aerial photography offers technical details on how the technology is used in ecological monitoring and rangeland science.
- The Library of Congress Research Guide on aerial photographs documents the historical development of aerial imaging and its applications in mapping and environmental observation.