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Infrared Photography
By Andrew | September 9, 2008
I’ve always thought infrared photography looked pretty neat, but I never wanted to deal with the long exposure times necessary to get enough light into the camera to expose the image properly. Since the sensors in digital cameras are sensitive to both infrared and visible light, there’s a piece of glass in between the lens and the sensor that’s there to filter out the IR light so only visible light makes it to the sensor. This glass doesn’t block out all the IR light so if you have a tripod, a filter, long enough exposure times and patience, you can take infrared pictures with a regular camera. The problem with this is that I’m too lazy to schlep a tripod around and am too impatient to set it up and snap a picture.
That and I’d pretty much be winging it since the viewfinder doesn’t work when you’re shooting IR.
Last week I remembered that I had an old SD400 laying around that I hadn’t picked up in a while so I decided to see what I could do to convert it to an IR camera. I spent a while trying to track down some developed unexposed negatives since those filter visible light but allow IR, but since nobody I know actually has film anymore that was a bust. I finally found some IR transparent plastic at Edmunds Optics that seemed to be perfect for what I needed. I ordered some and got it in the mail last week.
Taking apart the camera was surprisingly easy. I found the lens housing pretty quickly and the glass came out with just a pair of tweezers. The hard part was cutting the plastic I ordered to fit. I attempted to do it with an x-acto knife and it was taking forever to cut through since the material is 1.2mm thick. Finally, since the plastic is brittle I managed to just shear it off at some lines that I cut into it and get a piece of plastic that was the appropriate size. I reassembled the camera (with a shockingly small number of “spare parts” left over) and tried it out on my way to get coffee this morning.
I’m really pleased with the results. The images I’ve gotten are very sharp and the autofocus on the camera works as it should. The LCD on the back also works properly, allowing me to frame a photograph just as I would on a normal camera. The only issue I have is that the plastic isn’t perfectly opaque to visible light so there’s a red tint to all of my photographs when they should be nearly black and white.
The things I’ve found most interesting about the pictures are how chlorophyll reflects IR light (which is why the trees are white in the pictures), how lights that you normally wouldn’t see during the daytime are visible since they throw off a lot of IR and how glass that’s transparent visually is very reflective when photographed in infrared.
I’m really looking forward to taking this camera to some parks this weekend and seeing what kind of results I get with it.
Topics: Projects | 3 Comments »
September 9th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
[...] Digital photography by Andrew [...]
September 12th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
[...] Infrared Photography [...]
January 11th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
[...] through central park and I saw an eagle perched on top of a dead squirrel. Unfortunately I had my infrared camera in my hand at the time and couldn’t pull out my SLR in time to take a picture of the eagle [...]