If you’ve followed my blog for any amount of time, you’ll know that as the Spring Migration season for birds begins to wind down, I shift my photography back to landscapes and other subjects.

One of my favorite types of landscape photography is infrared, and I’ve written many posts about it in the past. All of that photography has been digital. At the end of 2023 I purchased several rolls of Rollei Infrared 400 B&W film, with the idea that this would be the year that I would dabble in analog infrared. I haven’t shot infrared film since probably somewhere around the late 1980’s, so this would be a fun experiment.

A few weekends ago, the forecast was calling for a nice, bright sunny day, so I decided to take a short trip to one of my favorite places to shoot infrared – Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio. Before my trip I decided to watch several videos on how to shoot with Rollei Infrared 400, and found a lot of different opinions and different levels of what I would call “successful” results. There also seems to be a lot of confusion regarding how to rate it with the R72 filter in place.

After watching several videos and doing some research online, I decided to rate the film at 6 ISO with the R72 filter on the camera, and meter accordingly.

For my trip to Spring Grove, I shot with both my Rolleiflex 3.5E and my Holga 120 Pan. I thought it would be fun to experiment with two different image ratios (1x1 versus 1x2) and also what its like to shoot the film with a high quality camera and a not-so high quality camera.

Because I only own one R72 filter in 52mm thread, I had to remember to switch the filter between the two cameras. Unfortunately there were a few times that I forgot to move the filter from the Rollei to the Holga, so those shots were WAY over-exposed and did not turn out. But I did manage to get a few. For the sunny morning that I was down there, most of my exposure times ranged from 10 to 20 seconds.

One thing to keep in mind while shooting infrared film is that the wavelength of infrared light is longer than light that the human eye can see, which means that the focus is slightly off in the camera compared to what you are seeing. That’s why many older lenses have that offset red line on them that also may have a red “R” on it. That’s the amount you change the focus on the lens to accommodate for the different wave length. In practice, its only really critical if you are shooting fairly wide open and trying to nail focus on a somewhat close subject. If you are shooting landscapes at anywhere around f/13 to f/16, your depth of field is so deep that it negates the issue. On the Rollei, I set the focus so that according to the scale anything from about 15 feet to Infinity would be in focus when at f/16 and then went with it. The Holga wasn’t as sophisticated, so I just set it to the sunny setting (@ f/13) and set the distance to the “Mountains” which is pretty much infinity.

The next day was a fairly rainy day, so that allowed for me to stay inside and catch up on my film developing. Unfortunately, developing wasn’t as straight-forward as I thought it would be. Looking at the Massive Development Chart, it appeared that there were several different mixes/methods for all of the developers that I have in my arsenal. For example, the Rodinal 1:25 mixture at 20C calls for either 5.25 minutes, 7.5 minutes, or 10.5 minutes. That’s a huge variation!

Looking at the notes for the 7.5 minute time, and knowing what I know about most other 400 speed film development times with that Rodinal mix, I decided to go with 7.5 minutes. I developed the first roll in this manner, and the negatives looked good, so I ran the second roll of the film the same way.

Once dried and scanned, I was able to confirm that I nailed the correct development time. Success!

Below are some of the images from that first day with Rollei IR film shot in my Rolleiflex 3.5E.

And below are two images from the Holga 120 Pan.

It’s definitely less grainy than I expected. I also think that rating it at ISO 6 (which is 6 stops under 400) is the correct rating, at least for Rodinal 1:25 @ 7.5 minutes. The “Wood Effect” is just about perfect, with little to no “glow” around the foliage, which is what I was looking for. All in all its not that far off of shooting digital IR with a good B&W conversion and some editing in post. Except that you get that all from just scanning the negative.

I have several more rolls of Rollei IR so I’m looking forward to shooting more with it this summer.

What do you think? Any plans in the future to shoot some Infrared film? Hopefully this post helps you with how to rate, shoot, and develop Rollei IR film.

Thanks for reading!

Jeremy