First invisible radiation photography

Infrared photography and thermal imaging

First infrared photograph

In October 1910 Robert Williams Wood (1868-1955) published the first infrared photographs - landscapes, taken that year on experimental film. One of these landscapes is reproduced above. [Pioneers of invisible radiation photography].

Colour infrared film was first developed experimentally by two scientists - D.A. Spencer and A. Marriage - working at the Kodak Research Laboratories in England, and further developed at the Kodak lab in Rochester, NY, where a patent was filed on 24 Oct 1942 and issued on 9 July 1946 in the names of Jelley and Wilder (US patent #2,403,722). Military and scientific usage dates from this time. From the early 1960s Eastman Kodak were spooling colour infrared film into 35mm cassettes, from which point it became more accessible to the general public. The process reproduces infrared as red, red as green, and green as blue. [Begleiter (2002), pp12-3; Clark]

It seems likely that stereoscopic infrared photographs were made soon after 1910, though I have not yet found evidence for this. Steven Schwarzman was photographing Stereo Infra-red Landscapes by 1976; his book of that title was published in 1980. A modern example of stereo infrared photography may be found here.

The first thermal imaging camera was developed for the military in Sweden in 1958 by a company called AGA, today known as Flir Systems. [IMVEurope: Seeing without Vision]

First infrared photograph of a person

Walter Clark (1899-1991) published an article in 1934 in the Journal of the Biological Photographic Association, on "Infrared photography". This included an infrared photograph of a woman's face, which is also reproduced above. [Pioneers of invisible radiation photography].

Steven Schwarzman was photographing infra-red stereo nudes by 1978; his book of them, Bodies of Light, was published in 1981.

Ultra-violet photography

First photograph recording ultra-violet radiation

Hermann W. Vogel (1834-98) accidentally discovered the application of short-wavelength photography to medicine in 1864 when he observed black spots on the face of a portrait of a woman - spots that were at the same time hidden to the naked eye. A few days after the photography, however, the woman was found to have smallpox. Films at that time of course were only sensitive to blue/ultraviolet light and they would have naturally enhanced the rendition of any skin condition. The significance of Vogel's discovery was not recognized at the time. Vogel's 1864 photograph is reproduced above. [Pioneers of invisible radiation photography].

In October 1910 Wood also published the first reflected ultraviolet photographs - landscapes, and geological and lunar surfaces.

First photographs by reflected ultra-violet radiation only

In a paper presented to the French Society of Physics in April 1919, Wood presented three ultraviolet photographs of the human body. The first photograph with the reflected ultraviolet technique showed a face with teeth fluorescing brightly, and he noted how the skin recorded grey. The other two photographs of hands demonstrated the beginnings of a fluorescence technique, which he applied to the back of a hand, recording both the reflected ultraviolet photograph and then his 'phosphorescence' photograph. All three are reproduced above. [Pioneers of invisible radiation photography].

Full-spectrum photography

Full-spectrum photography is a subset of full-spectrum imaging, defined currently among photography enthusiasts as imaging with consumer cameras the full, broad spectrum of a film or camera sensor bandwidth. In practice, specialized broadband/full-spectrum film captures visible and near infrared light, commonly referred to as the 'VNIR'. Modified digital cameras can detect some ultra-violet, all of the visible and much of the near infrared spectrum. Digital cameras normally contain an infrared hot mirror filter that blocks most of the infrared and some of the ultraviolet that would otherwise be detected by the sensor, but replacing the hot mirror or infrared blocking filter with an infrared pass or a wide spectrally transmitting filter allows the camera to detect the wider spectrum light at greater sensitivity.

Electro-optical engineer David Twede has been developing full-spectrum photography art. Two examples from 2007 may be found on Wikipedia. Examples depicting both men and women can be seen at Surrealmodels.

X-ray photography and CT scanning

Hand mit Ringen

Stereoscopic X-ray photographs were made as early as 1896, according to Stereoscopy.com, where a modern example is shown.

Computed tomography (CT) is a medical imaging method employing tomography. Digital geometry processing is used to generate a 3D image of the inside of an object from a large series of two-dimensional X-ray images taken around a single axis of rotation.

In September 1971, CT scanning was introduced into medical practice with a successful scan on a cerebral cyst patient at Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, London. However, Godfrey Hounsfield (1919-2004), the inventor, had previously built a prototype head scanner and tested it first on a preserved human brain, then on a fresh cow brain from a butcher shop, and later on himself.