Most days, Matthew Breindel works as a video game developer in the Seattle, WA area. But, whenever possible, he heads out to the street, the park, the shore, or another continent entirely, camera in hand, ready to capture something beautiful.
As a teenager, Matthew began shooting landscapes and flora with his father's old Canon FTb, a film camera twice as old as he was. Soon he found a way to combine his art with his passion for science and delved into infrared photography, with which he could capture the invisible. “Although infrared light is all around us,” says Matthew, “it cannot be seen with the naked eye. This meant that every photo I took provided a glimpse into a secret world, subtly different from our own. A world where grass, vines, and people glow white, and the noonday sky becomes black.”
Matthew's focus has changed over time. Some years he will focus on fine art nudes, using infrared to reveal a quite literally hidden beauty in his models. During other years, he will return to landscapes, both in infrared and visible light. Although Matthew is busier than ever, he still looks forward to each opportunity to take his camera outside, to see the unseen, and to share it with the world.
Believe it or not, all photos on this site numbered 0046-34 and below were taken with film and are completely unedited beyond what was required to match the appearance of the slides or negatives. Images like the one on the entry page for this site have the surreal colors they do thanks to being taken with Kodak Ektachrome Infrared (EIR) slide film. This very special (and, sadly, now extinct) film rendered red as green, green as blue, and infrared as red (or magenta). (For the curious, blue was eliminated by using a yellow filter over the lens.)
Beginning with roll 47, the photos were taken digitally but, once again, the photos with the craziest, most surreal colors were only minimally retouched. For the most part, images with blue trees on dark or reddish skies were created not in Photoshop but with a Schott RG-665 filter and a modified digital camera. Similarly, green or yellow trees on blue skies were created with a Schott BG-3 filter. They represent a new field in photography: digital color infrared.