If you know The Unforgettable Fire by U2, you’ll know it’s a solid album — but it’s the cover photo that really sticks in the mind.

What’s most interesting to me is that the photo wasn’t the photographer’s original idea. Anton Corbijn, who shot the cover, had come across an image of Moydrum Castle in a book called In Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ireland by Simon Marsden. Something about Marsden’s photograph clearly stayed with him, because Corbijn’s shot of U2 standing in front of the same crumbling castle is almost an exact recreation of Marsden’s original.

If Marsden’s picture inspired Corbijn to experiment with infrared film, then it was Corbijn’s version, 35 years later, that inspired me to hit “buy” on an adapted digital infrared camera.

Here’s the thing about infrared: it’s tricky.

As photographers, we’re used to looking at a scene and having a fair idea of how the final image will look. Infrared throws all that out of the window. It sees light in a completely different way, revealing things the eye can’t, and making familiar places look otherworldly.

I’ve been shooting infrared for about seven years now, and I’m still learning. But when I first picked up that Olympus Pen E-P2 in 2019, I was completely clueless. I’d purchased a camera with a 590nm infrared conversion, knowing that it could produce those surreal yellow leaves and pale blue skies, but I had no idea how to actually achieve that look in post-processing.

So on a bright sunny day, I took the camera to my local park and fired off a few test shots. I wasn’t expecting much – and true to form, I came home with a handful of very average photos.

Every journey has to start somewhere, though. Bit by bit, I learned how to white balance in-camera, how to expose properly for infrared light, and how to channel-swap the RAW files in Affinity Photo so those magenta skies could look a little more natural.

This was the first infrared photo I ever took. It’s not going to win any awards — but it was the start of a journey down a fascinating rabbit hole that I’m still exploring today.