UV Fluorescence Photography is also known as Ultraviolet Induced Visible Fluorescence Photography (UVIVF). Most living things have some degree of UV fluorescence. Flowers are the most common subjects for UV photography, it seems. Some flowers under 100% UV light will illuminate with spectacular results. Some people speculate that insects, especially bees, know this because they can see in UV light, while humans typically can’t. By fluorescing in UV light, flowers draw attention to themselves for the purposes of pollination. This kind of photography with flowers can be a matter of trial and error—finding those flowers that irradiate and those that don’t. (A red rose, for instance, will simply show up red in a UV time-exposure; likewise, the Chrysanthemum I photographed was useless. Yellow Daylily? Meh. Calla Lily? Meh.) We began by snipping a few different kinds from our garden. Most didn’t give the results we were hoping for but the Purple Sage fluoresced very nicely. My own experience so far shows the following flowers also work: Anthuriums, white Impatiens, Lilies, Columbines, white Gerbera Daisies, Orchids, Milkweed, Gladiolus, and Sunflower.
The set up requires a dark room (absolutely no ambient light), tripod, a macro lens if you want to get close up to your flower specimen, and—most importantly—a UV lighting setup. What you are seeing here was shot in total blackness with five UV lighting arms. But this is a potentially dangerous kind of photography: you need to ensure that you don’t look directly into the bulbs at the end of the lighting arms and that you don’t get the light in your eyes or on your skin. Glasses with UV protection help as far as your peepers are concerned. As well, the end of the arms where the lighting bulbs are can get awfully hot so don’t touch the metal when adjusting the arms; handle the rubber coating them. (They cool down very quickly, at least.)
This type of photography can be a challenge. You need to keep the normal room lights on in order to focus in manual mode. Once focused, with the UV bulbs lighting up the object to your satisfaction, turn off the regular lights then prepare for a time-exposure of several minutes. An f-stop closed right down (f22) will help with focusing issues (depth of field) but will mean a very long exposure unless you up the ISO, but too high an ISO will mean a lot of noise. An f-stop of, say, f9 will allow much more light in a shorter time. We found, after our first experimentation, that a wider aperture at a higher ISO (say, 1600) will get results quickly (but, again, a lot of noise). Subsequently, however, we have been settling typically on around 200 ISO, f8 or f9, and exposures of around four to five minutes.
But then post-processing is a challenge as well. Depth of field is a problematic issue. Focus-stacking may solve that problem if you have the software and the computer can handle the load. Noise is also something you’ll need to deal with, esp. with the black background. That’s not necessarily a problem as a high noise reduction can give the photo a softer look. For the black background, sometimes I use the Eyedropper Colour Sampler tool with the Cloning Brush in Photoshop to “paint” out the noise.
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