photograph heat rising

[tzava]

hello everyone, 2nd post here ..
I wanted to ask , because i can`t find any tutorials, how could someone photograph heat ?
i mean hear rising from a railway in mid summer, or water boiling in a glass recipient with an electric heater in it .
tried last summer the railway thing, didn`t end up what i wanted, the heat wasn`t visible in the photo .

any advice ?

p.s. : excuse my bad english, not my native language.

[Stryker]

I can think of two ways to do this, the frst is something you have mentioned yourself, boiling water. You can capture steam issuing from the spout of the kettle, which is an indication of heat. The second is a little more challenging, photographing heat waves off an empty stretch of road. You get a lot of those if the weather is hot enough and the blacktop gets very hot around mid-day. You may have to get low down on the road surface to get the shimmering effect visible in the photo. I am not sure how the weather is where you live, is it hot enough for this? Good luck with your attempt.

[Palladius]

Very interesting question! The heat shimmer you're talking about is caused by lower density air by the hot object, which causes light to refract as it passes from high density to low density, much like it does at the surface of water. How you'd go about capturing that is intriguing...


I'd guess you'd need an exceptionally fast shutter... that would be my first try, in any case. Because the hot air is less dense it will be constantly moving, and unless you capture the moment quickly the effect will average out and be unnoticeable.

Also, you wont be able to shoot the heat haze itself, because it doesn't technically exist! You want to shoot an object through the distortion... maybe something that will show the refraction. It's kinda like using a red filter... it doesn't make the subject red, it just distorts the light to make it look red, so you're not trying to photograph the filter, just something that's been affected by the filter... does that make sense?

If it weren't ten degrees Celsius here, I'd go out and give it a go!

[tzava]

thanx for the replys.

the only 2 pictures i managed to try were last summer, a railroad while i was waiting fot a train.
Pictures were shot at f/11 1/250 with a 18-55is and a canon 450d (Digital Rebel Xsi / hate the rebel name ).

temperature was about 45 degrees celsius in the sun / 113 degrees Fahrenheit and the effect was intese while viewed, but on the photos it`s barely noticeable.

i didn`t know much about composition and dof an aperture . i mean used iso 200 in scorching sun ..

guess i`ll try again in the mid summer, until then glass kettle and an thing that you put in the water. It`s a metal spiral, electrical, heats up, boils water ( don`t know english name, coudn`t find on google ).


i`ll upload the 2 shots i took last summer tomorrow if anyone`s interested .

again please excuse my bad ortography .. english is not my strong point .

[dcclark]

You just used the word "orthography", which is an excellent english word which I doubt most english speakers know. So don't worry about the spelling!

[kencaleno]

Photographing heat is a job for Infra-red photography. Regards, Ken

[fletch]

Originally Posted by kencaleno

Photographing heat is a job for Infra-red photography. Regards, Ken

He is not trying to photograph actual heat though but the effect that heat has on light. Therefore standard photography is the way forward.

As Palladius stated the 'heat haze' effect is cause by small pockets of air a different temperatures messing with the light causing object viewed behind the haze to be blured. This photo found on flickr proves it is possible.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/schoolb...ry/1840433194/

I tried a google search on hints for capturing it but there wasn't anything, only advice on how to avoid it so doing the oposite might help. Seemed the key thing was shooting a long way away using a long focal lenght.

Edit: more examples, seems common factor is focal length

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8622063@N04/2386245165/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/raycollister/2560203327/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14691648@N06/2514988860/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blissimages/508567801/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevebirrell/204277025/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11371618@N00/2150662307/

[RoyL]

You need a combination of long focal length, 200mm up, aperture setting of f16 to f32 and slow shutter. And a hood on the lens. Make sure you don't have any filters such as UV.

After the shot is captured, or you think you might have it then you will need to edit it to bring out the detail otherwise it gets lost in the background detail.

Sorry kencaleno, this is standard daylight landscape photography. Things such as deserts, roads, and of course railway lines. It is a shimmering refraction of light and heat, the camera will capture the light.

[Cowmobile]

I am currently doing alot of moving big rigs and always get the heat distortion from the exhaust shooting on the short end of a 70-200mm 2.8 with shutter at 1/500...f 8 er so with a 400 ISO.

[Palladius]

Photographing heat is a job for Infra-red photography. Regards, Ken

Well... sort of.Heat isn't the same as infra-red radiation, at all*. Although it's an easy mistake to make since they so often appear together in the popular imagination, it's actually a common misconception.

In any case, the infra-red I assume you're referring to (the kind you can capture with an SLR) is much closer in wavelength to visible light than it is to the light detected by thermal imaging cameras.


* Commence geek-out: All hot bodies (i.e. all objects above absolute zero) will emit radiation, and the hotter the body is, the shorter the wavelength (starting with high frequency radiowaves for seriously, seriously cold bodies, working up to infrared wavelength for bodies at room temperature). This is probably why we associate infrared radiation with 'heat', since it's the wavelength emitted by objects that count as hot in the narrow range of temperatures we need to survive.

When a body gets much hotter than room temperature, up to thousands of degrees, it starts emitting light in the visible spectrum, starting at red light at about 3000 degrees Kelvin working up to blue light at about 8000 degrees Kelvin (and beyond that, ultraviolet). Astute readers will note that this roughly corresponds to the numbers we use to indicate white balance and colour temperature. It may also explain why physicists might look at you weird if you show them a reddish tinted photo and say it has a warm colour temperature... red light is emitted by much cooler bodies than blue light.

**End geek-out**