Artist Profile – Luke Tscharke

If you enjoy Monochrome Infrared Landscapes, you will love Luke Tscharke’s work.

Luke, please tell us about yourself and your background

My name is Luke Tscharke and I’m a passionate landscape photographer from Sydney, Australia. I’m actually trained as a Quality professional, and have worked for some of the world’s largest food and beverage companies to ensure the quality and integrity of their products. I try to adopt this approach with my landscape photography, where I aim to create memorable natural landscape images from locations across Australia and other parts of the world.

How long have you been a photographer?

I have been shooting seriously for about seven years but have always been interested in photography. When I was a child I would read books about places around the world and would be fascinated by the images on the pages. I would dream about being able to take images that would one day also be published in books. I started getting into it seriously when I moved to Sydney and was captivated by the mountains and beaches that are in close proximity to the city, and the amazing harbor, it’s really a great place to live as a photographer.

How long have you been shooting Infrared?

I have been in shooting in Infrared for about a year. I decided to send my Canon 5D Mark II camera in to Lifepixel for a conversion. Soon after I received the camera I took it on a 3 week trip to Iceland and photographed much of the country in Infrared. It was an incredible experience and I enjoyed shooting in Infrared so much that I took more IR frames than visible color frames while I was over there.

What  types of Infrared images do you make?

Being a landscape photographer most of my images show natural outdoor scenes. A lot of my IR images are driven by the conditions present in the sky. I particularly like dark brooding skies which give great light for infrared photography. I generally convert all of my IR work to black and white, I’m still not quite sure about false color yet but I plan to experiment more with it.

 

What is your best photographic  achievement?

Recently an infrared image of mine called ‘Barossa Bolt’ won Photograph of the Year in the International Landscape Photographer of the Year awards. I was very pleased by this result as the number and quality of images entered was very high. I was also very proud this year to have two images featured on the front of Australian Geographic magazine, which is a publication I very much admire.

What do like best about IR photography?

I love that infrared images provide a point of difference. I often say that IR allows me to capture scenes literally in a different light. With so many photographers out there it is often hard to be unique in the crowd. I find Infrared is a brilliant way of differentiating myself.

I also like it that the conditions for making a good image in IR can often be poor conditions for making a good image with a visible color camera. For this reason it gives me a lot of flexibility to work around the conditions presented to me whilst out in the field.

What do you find most challenging about IR?

I find coping with lens hotspots a challenge at times. I have a lot of lenses so it is important to understand how they perform in IR so that hotspots do not become a problem. I also find that metering the exposure for a well exposed image can be challenging initially too.

If you could go anywhere in the world to shoot IR, where would you go?

I travelled to Iceland last year and was able to cross that off my list of places! I’d very much recommend it. I would love to travel to Patagonia or New Zealand to photograph in IR, I think the mountains and dramatic weather would make for some amazing infrared photographs.

If you could pass on just one tip about IR, what would it be?



Ordinary scenes can look very cool in Infrared. Experiment and you can be pleasantly surprised!

Do you have any projects currently going you would like to discuss?

My next project involves a new camera. I have just ordered an infrared conversion on my Sony A7R which I am extremely excited about. It will be a fantastic upgrade to my IR Canon 5D Mark II as it will be much more compact and lightweight whilst being able to shoot infrared in 36 megapixels. It will be compact enough for me to take it more places where traditionally I would only have space for my regular visible color camera, such as my long distance hikes.

You can see more of Luke’s work here.