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Sunday, April 13, 2008

infrared (mis)focus

I found out that my camera does not filter out infrared light, so all I have to do is put on an infrared filter and I can take infrared photography. So I took it out for a spin yesterday, and it was too bright out to check the preview on the LCD. When I got home I discovered that all of my subjects were out of focus. That's the first one of the kid, at Baker Beach. Turns out I needed to compensate for a focus shift with infrared. Today I tried to account for it by focusing at 2/3 to 3/4 of the distance to the subject, with moderate success. That's the second one of the tree, in Japantown. It's still very iffy, so bracketing a few for good measure will probably be the best way to go. As if I weren't slow enough with the manual focus....

4 comments:

cignoh said...

very cool! i tried infrared on my camera but my results looked really different... did you remove all the saturation or is that just how it turned out? then someone i know at work converted his camera to IR and has been getting results like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/
digitalcraftsman/sets/72157604360102387/

but that is not just a filter.

sorry your pics were all out of focus. that sounds hard---having to adjust your focus accordingly...

to format the images, i'm doing some simple html---added a table with rows/columns. do you want help with that?

lanaconqueso said...

I did process them into b/w photos because the colors came out so strange and I didn't know what to do with it. thanks for the link! I think before processing they did look more like those. I will have to explore color possibilities...

I think it's a sort of controversial "feature" of the M8 that the body does not block infrared like most unconverted SLRs. So for normal shooting I actually have a different filter that blocks UV and IR, and for infrared I swap it out for a filter that lets in just the IR. From what I've read it does not respond to as wide of a range of wavelengths as a true infrared camera, but it is pretty close.

Ah, I just noticed the html tab. I'll try making a table next time. thanks!

Anonymous said...

The photo at the beach is breathtaking!

Robin D. said...

the focus shift sounds like it would be pretty frustrating to deal with. by bracketing, do you mean taking a few shots at different focal distances? i wasn't sure. i really like the way the tree photo turned out. it looks almost dreamlike with the ghostly bright leaves (i assume they were green in real life, but they look more like yellow autumn leaves). the other photo is a great natural shot (i love the splashing water around his legs), and it looks really good in the medium size on Flickr where you don't notice the slight blurriness.