“Infrared Color Photography of Cannikin Test Site, Amchitka Island, Alaska, September 1971.”

I’m not quite clear on the attribution for this photo. It’s from this site, where it has this caption:

Infrared Color Photography of Cannikin Test Site, Amchitka Island, Alaska, September 1971. Red to pink color tones indicate healthy, live tundra vegitation. Dark tracks in tundra were caused by vehicles traveling across the tundra. Light gray to dark gray indicates exposed ground or gravel-covered areas (such as roads). Photograph was taken from an altitude of 1,500 feet on a heavily covercast day at f/5 and 1/250 sec with a K-17 Fairchild aerial camera fastened to the outside of an Alloutte III helicopter. (Photo in Joe Stevens collection from Baine Cater.)

I came across the image at the Arms Control Wonk blog. A quick bit of googling didn’t turn up anything else on the image, and searches for “Joe Stevens” and “Baine Cater” were both unproductive. If anybody happens to know anything about it, I’d love to hear.

I’m posting this mostly because it’s something of a novelty for me, because it’s a color infrared photograph, and I kind of like it.

For the most part, I don’t care for color IR photography, despite my love of black and white infrared. The reasons I dislike color IR are probably a lot like other folks’ reasons for hating black and white IR — it usually looks to me like strange for the sake of strange, deliberately outré. (Doubtless this is just a prejudice of mine — pay it no heed.)

That may be the key to why this photograph appeals to me while most color IR that I’ve seen has not. It’s utilitarian, it’s straightforward — and the greatest strangeness in it comes from the purpose of the site it documents, rather than the colors of the photograph. And unlike many aerial photographs, when viewed by a lay audience, it does not become a picture-puzzle.