When I was a kid, I thought being able to see infrared and ultraviolet would be a great superpower. X-ray vision, not so much, because it'd be all skeletons all the time, and I've never been goth enough to find that appealing. A couple of weeks ago I was surprised to learn that my camera detects near-IR light. Which got me wondering if there was a way to make it only see infrared. Hopefully without having to spend a lot of money or disassemble anything.
Turns out there's an extremely simple way to do just that. I rifled through my dusty old box of film photos, and looked through my negatives until I found a couple of unexposed end bits. Layer them together and add some tape to hold them in place, and you've got a homemade IR filter. If you try to look through it you'll notice that almost no visible light makes it through, so anything the camera sees has to be something else.
So here are a few preliminary attempts at taking IR photos.
The thing that really stands out in IR is foliage, and fortunately my general neighborhood is full of foliage. Leaves appear to glow, while the sky comes out rather dark. Here's that damn Leland One / Rusting Chunks No. 5 sculpture again. The trees in direct sunlight just then came out way overexposed. If I hadn't done that, I'm not sure the rest of the scene would've been visible.
Here are some subsequent and better attempts.
Here are a few pages with tons of info about IR photos, if you're interested, at Rochester Institute of Technology, dpfwiw, Photo tidbits, CoCam, and PhotoNotes.org
A funny thing about IR with digital cameras is that the more you spend, generally speaking, the less useful the camera is. Infrared is Considered Harmful for general camera usage, so you see IR-blocking filters fixed over cameras' image sensors. The more you spend, the "better" IR filtering you get. I think even mine does it to some degree, so you've got IR and anti-IR filters fighting each other, and you're detecting what little light makes it through both of those.
My dinky little $14.99 VuPoint camera, however, doesn't seem to do any IR-blocking at all, based on the experimenting I've done so far. I didn't bring the right cable with me so I can't pull today's photos off of it right now, but here are a couple of silly ones from earlier. First, my alter ego in mid-transmogrification into IR superhero mode, film sprocket holes and everything:
The completed transformation, FWIW:
Incidentally, I've noticed the VuPoint is better suited to talking to Macs than it is to Windows, which is kind of surprising. The desktop software on Windows is clunky and cartoonish, while on OSX it just talks to iPhoto like a good camera should. The resulting images are BMP files on OSX, but JPG on Windows, even though BMP is a Windows-centric format. I figure that means BMP is the camera's "RAW" format, or the closest thing to it. Apparently if you leave compression off on the camera, the desktop software applies it on that end, so there's really no advantage to turning it off in that case. I don't really see the point of that; the BMP files come out at around 360k instead of the ~50k compressed size. 360k is still pretty tiny, so I'm not sure why they went to the trouble.
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