Any good tricks to using infrared LED's?

I'm designing a circuit with a set of 6 IR LED's that will be blinking. Currently, they are all hooked up in parallel. The nominal voltage suggested is 1.2, which is what I am running. However, it doesn't say anything about nominal current, and I'm running maybe 30 mA. I don't have any IR detectors, and mostly I want the LED's to emit as much IR light as possible. I don't know if they're even emitting any light, so my question is can they be hooked up and run just like regular LED's (except with significantly less voltage) and emit IR light, or is there a special way to hook them up?