Beyond the Visible Spectrum

Beyond the Visible Spectrum

Beyond the visible spectrum can take us towards the blue or towards the red, and in photography we usually are looking at Infra Red. I have always used Photoshop to create "pseudo-IR" images and these can look good, but there's nothing to beat doing the job properly. When we shot film this meant an R72 or R95 filter and Kodak High Speed Infra Red film (black and white) or the Ektachrome false-colour transparency film. In digital, cameras have varied in their response to IR light, many having quite severe IR filters that block it out. This helps to increase sharpness, but it's no good if you want IR images. The best cameras for pseudo-IR images were small Kodak 2MP compacts, which had no filtering out of the IR light.

The alternative is to have a standard digital camera converted to IR only imaging. This renders it useless for normal photography, but I've just bought such a beast and it makes a real difference. The camera I have purchased is a converted Samsung GX20 DSLR, with a 14.2MP CMOS sensor. This is Samsung's version of the Pentax K20D, a camera that I enjoyed using in the past and which can hold its head up high even today. By removing any filters over the sensor that block IR light and replacing them with filters that only allow IR through, we have the ideal IR camera.

It's early days yet, and I was really busy finishing off a review, but I did find time to shoot a few images today and just briefly play with them. Here's the results so far.












I shall look forwards to doing a proper day's shoot when time allows.