As a long time lover of shooting with my Rolleiflex I decided to see how it would fare shooting infrared after I managed to find a filter that would fit it on ebay. Theoretically it should be good for infrared given it has a separate viewing lens so faming would be much more accurate than with my Zeiss Ikonta with it's little viewfinder. Focusing should be better too infrared focusing issues aside.

Although the infrared film I use film is rated at ISO 400 the infrared filter costs you four stops (you can hardly see anything through it with the naked eye) which means you're actually shooting at ISO 25 and getting exposure times of about 1 second. So I had the idea Ito try pushing the film so I could shoot it hand held. I couldn't really find any info on pushing the Rollei 400 IR film so I just took a guess on adjusting the development time to push it 3 stops, meaning I could expose and meter it at ISO 100.

Anyway, I couldn't believe my luck, the test worked great. The exposures looked good and surprisingly the film, which is normally a bit grainy anyway, took to pushing really well and actually came out easily as smooth as normal Ilford HP5+. In fact better if anything. The other bonus seemed to be that the Rollei focused really accurately. Which is astonishing given infrared causes focus shift in almost everything meaning taking shots of anything but landscapes very tricky. I can only put this down to the Rollei lenses being simple and having less elements the modern lenses and perhaps the glass having a fairly unique refractive index at infrared wavelengths. Anyway here's some pictures from that test roll.

Whilst on the subject of Infrared. Here's a few shots from my infrared Nirkon (see earlier post) which I took on an outing to Bolton Abbey recently.