As an aside - I did a little bit of research into digital IR. With the right camera (probably the high end Sony - I forget the model but it has night mode) it is straightfoward. Digicams (as opposed to Digital SLRs) have a filter to cut out infrared light in front of the sensor. The funny thing is that my old Canon A75 does a poor job of cutting out IR light. If you point it at the IR light emited by say a remote control - it shows up as white on the LCD.
This is in no way a good solution since what you really want is to remove the IR filter, and believe it or not there are lots of articles on the web about how to do that yourself. There is also a guy that will do it for you for a couple hundred bucks and put in the filter you want instead.
I looked at a lot of digital infrared stuff over the last few weeks. It isn't the same as film (I don't think) because of the lack of a anti-halation layer on the Kodak film which causes all sorts of glows and whatnot as light bounces around and makes its way back through the film. But in this arena - digital looks easier. Again - with the right camera.
Again - the A75 is not what you really want since you will want to do this in RAW mode. But just for fun - if I have nothing better to do I might open the gizmo up and see how hard it is to remove the filter.
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I found an excellent summary of shooting with film IR here by David Romano.* * *
2 comments:
Hi Jim -
Beautiful stuff on your site btw. But yes - I looked at your IR, and a lot of other sites with digital IR. I'm not quite sure if I could live with the "shooting blind" and tripod aspect of it. For example - the shot of the guy in the rowboat in the blog was handheld and hanging over the bridge etc. And I like it a lot.
Just out of curiosity - have you ever used a less severe filter such as a wratten 25 which just cuts things 2 stops and you would be able to see through.
Any other suggestions re: being able to see what you're shooting with the filter on or is this the way it's done with digital, in which case you would need a viewfinder where you could still see what's going on exactly.
But yes, there are just certain places (nature mostly) that I've never been able to get to my satisfaction until the IR experiments.
Jim,
That's funny because the 78 filter (if that's the right number?) never entered my mind because everything around here seems to move (even the subway sometimes). Of course I now know that neon does not emit much IR, which is why the subway shots I did with IR were so underexposed.
I'm using the #25 which is not even the deep-red. It's very easy to meter etc. I just use my handheld meter at ASA 100 and process normally. I'll open up a stop if there isn't much infrared material in the scene. In general ASA 100 is about as low as I'm willing to go as a starting point.
DB
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