Chad Ajamian, Snowy Mountains Bushfires in Infrared (ART 2022)

This series was shot in the SNowy Mountains, following Australia's worst ever bushfire season. I was inspired to use the rare Kodak Aerochrome to capture this scene, a false-colour infrared film designed for wartime aerial surveillance. It was used by the military from the 1940s, as it contrasts man-made structures in dense vegation, such as guerrilla forces. This provides a hauntingly beautiful abstraction of the bushfire impacts in these images, where the black burnt forest is peppered with the red grassy regrowth, bounded by the purple in the sky and water.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.