Centralia is a town of beauty. The gentle rolling hills and foliage make for a very scenic place. However, as we all know, there is desolation in the town when one considers photographs from 30 years ago to those taken recently. So for my third trip, I decided to focus on the desolation and abandonment of the town. Black and white tends to be well suited for conveying such a mood. But I decided to further magnify the abandonment using the surrealistic appearance of black and white infrared photography.

Centralia PA in B&W Infrared

About Infrared...

Infrared (IR) radiation is electromagnetic radiation whose wavelength is longer than that of visible light, but shorter than that of terahertz radiation and microwaves. The name means "below red" (from the Latin infra, "below"), red being the color of visible light with the longest wavelength. Infrared radiation has wavelengths between about 750 nm and 1 mm, spanning three orders of magnitude. Humans at normal body temperature can radiate at a wavelength of 10 microns.

Infrared imaging is used extensively for both military and civilian purposes. Military applications include target acquisition, surveillance, night vision, homing and tracking. Non-military uses include thermal efficiency analysis, remote temperature sensing, short-ranged wireless communication, spectroscopy, and weather forecasting. Infrared astronomy uses sensor-equipped telescopes to penetrate dusty regions of space, such as molecular clouds; detect cool objects such as planets, and to view highly red-shifted objects from the early days of the universe.

In infrared photography, infrared filters are used to capture the near-infrared spectrum. Digital cameras often use infrared blockers. Cheaper digital cameras and camera phones have less effective filters and can "see" intense near-infrared, appearing as a bright purple-white color. This is especially pronounced when taking pictures of subjects near IR-bright areas (such as near a lamp), where the resulting infrared interference can wash out the image. There is also a technique called 'T-ray' imaging, which is imaging using far infrared or terahertz radiation. Lack of bright sources makes terahertz photography technically more challenging than most other infrared imaging techniques. Recently T-ray imaging has been of considerable interest due to a number of new developments such as terahertz time-domain spectroscopy.