Infrared camera
Photography is an art and it welcomes any kind of experimentation. If you have never tried Infrared Photography, you should experiment with this method. It may open up a number of original and unexpected in-camera effects for you and will surely diverse your photography collection with unusual images.
In infrared photography, the CCD sensor is sensitized to infrared light. Usually an “infrared filter” is used: this lets infrared light pass through to the camera but blocks all or virtually all of the visible light spectrum (and thus looks black). The use of such filters together with infrared-sensitive sensors results in very interesting “in-camera effects”: false-color or black and white images with a dreamlike or sometimes lurid appearance.
Infrared photography was popular with 1960s recording artists, because of the unusual results. Jimi Hendrix, Donovan and the Grateful Dead all issued albums with infrared cover photos. Infrared photography can easily look gimmicky, but photographers such as Elio Ciol have made subtle use of black-and-white infrared-sensitive film.
The problem with this kind of photography is that you can’t use your conventional camera for creating these unusual effects, because the exposure times become overly long and it may cause noise and motion blur in the final image. An infrared camera is an expensive toy, the Nikon D50 infra-red, for instance, has a price of about $750-800. But there is a cheaper way to take infrared photos.
Zach Stern offers a detailed instruction on how you can make a Digital Toy Infrared Camera from a cheap digicam.
What you need to make a home-made toyIR camera:
- an inexpensive digital camera, for example the Aiptek Pocket DVII, that costs $30
- a sheet of “Congo Blue” filter gel (Lee #181 or Rosco #382) (available at local suppliers or B&H for about $6 per 24” sheet. If you’re REALLY cheap, you can cut the gels out of a free sample book – read the article).
Read the full instruction from Zach Stern.
Read more about Infrared Photography:
- All you ever wanted to know about digital UV and IR photography, but could not afford to ask Enhance IR photos - Article in EPhotoZine
- Jeremy McCreary’s infrared (IR) basics for digital photographers.
- Digital infrared galleries at Kleptography.com, plus Conversion instructions for the Canon G1
- Digital infrared do it yourself conversion tutorials, services and infrared photo manipulation videos
Technorati Tags: infrared photography, infrared cameras, infrared photos, digital photography, black and white
Loading ...
December 1st, 2006 at 1:08 am
Hi, I am interested in having my DSLR converted to IR by having the IR filter removed. I was wondering If it was possible to have a external IR filter that threads onto my lenses that will block the IR light to the sensor but still transmit all visible light through it, mimicking the original internal IR filter that was previously attached to the cameras image sensor? That way when I want to take IR photos I just take off the IR filter from my camera and when I want to take regular visible spectrum photos I put the IR filter back on?