Mount Rushmore, South Dakota
Los Angeles-based photographer Kaitlin Kelly takes gorgeous infrared photographs of famous landmarks that will make you see them in a new light.
In an interview with PetaPixel, Kelly said she got into infrared photography around 2006, and started experimenting with a Hora R72 filter.
It was during her summer travels with her dad abroad that she decided to shoot in infrared to make her photographs stand out from the usual snapshots.
“We’d go to these major locations and I’d get so annoyed; I wanted to take pictures of the Eiffel Tower, the London Eye, but I wanted them to be different than everybody else’s... and then I realized, wait, I have a skill that most people don’t. I made the decision to exploit this beautiful spectrum of invisible light to transform landmarks from something familiar to something alien.”
Kelly shoots in RAW mode and does extensive post-processing work to ensure the images turn out right. The process involves swapping the red and blue channels, and editing the images in Lightroom to give them a “really clean, pure look.”
She cites people as her biggest challenge, lamenting that she’s had to abandon shoots because people kept running up to her when she tried to take pictures.
Proving that “sometimes the best place to shoot isn’t the most obvious”, Kelly recounted her trip to Germany last summer, where she managed to take a great photograph of Neuschwanstein castle from a unique vantage point by hiking past a cordoned-off area.
Read her interview here, and view more of her work at her website, Flickr page and 500px.
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Eiffel Tower, Paris
The Old Filmmuseum, Amsterdam
Dunnottar Castle, Scotland
London Eye, London
Neuschwanstein Castle, Bavaria, Germany
[via PetaPixel, images via Kaitlin Kelly]