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I first started getting interested seriously in UV photography in the 1980’s, when I worked in a hospital photographic department, and they were using UVR to see if it could be used as an early detection system for melanomas.
I then started reading about floral UV signatures, and, as a nature photographer, thought I would try it, ending with an MSc in 1994 with the highly pretentious title:
“An Examination of Photographic Techniques for the Production of Trichromatic Images of Plants Representing Insect Spectral Sensitivity”
This was of course pre-digital, so I ended up using two extremely cumbersome techniques:
1. Photograph a flower/plant in UV (monochrome film) then the same flower with the same camera/lens (normal coated 105mm micro Nikkor lens so requiring many multiple flashes. Kodak Wood’s Glass 18A filter) with colour negative film, using Kodak Wratten colour separation filters to get the red and green components. I then printed these in register in a colour darkroom onto colour paper in total darkness! Each image took a whole morning if you were lucky! The results were, to say the least, poor!
2. Photograph as above, using colour transparency rather than colour negative film. Make a B/W transparency from the monochrome image, then project the three images using three aligned Kodak Carousel projectors, and photograph the final projected image. Again, the results were very por, but did give a glimpse as what might be happening!
I even made my own grey scale using varying amounts of carbon black and magnesium oxide.
I was doing something right as I did achieve the MSc., but it does look very poor now looking at the images again! I have included a couple of the monochrome images from the time, shot on Ilford FP4 from around 1990
