2010 marked the centenary of the first published infrared image. This is the Infrared 100 blog, which celebrates that centenary and discusses all aspects of infrared imaging: near and far.
Kolari Vision have been busy. They have introduced a behind-the-lens clip-in system for filtering which allows you to swap filters directly in front of the sensor. This is especially useful for lenses which don't allow you to put a fiter in front of the lens, such as fish-eyes. Of course some lenses have special filter slots built-in but these are inherently restricted.
I had wondered whether a full-spectrum converted mirrorless camera would revert to conventional visible light work by putting an infrared-blocking filter (aka 'hot mirror') in front of the sensor/lens. After all, unlike an SLR, the exposure sensing is done from the main sensor, not from a separate system, so it will still function as normal if the 'hot mirror' has the same characteristic as the original.
It turns out that Kolari have come to the same conclusion. If you have a mirrorless camera converted for full-spectrum photography, such as a Nikon Z series, you can then add a suitable 'hot mirror' flter in front of the sensor simply by clicking it into the Kolari magnetic filter system. In that case, your camera is 'conventional' again.
One important thing to bear in mind is that if you buy a new camera and have it converted (by any facility, not just Kolari) you will probably invalidate the original warranty. So best to wait a bit.
One of the big cinematic releases at the moment is the second part of Denis Villeneuve‘s interpretation of Frank Herbert's SF Epic Dune.
Cinematographer Greig Fraser decided to use near-infrared (NIR) imaging to show the weird environment of the planet occupied by the film's uber-villains, the Harkonnens. He had used the technique before, on Zero Dark Thirty in 2012 and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in 2016.
While the Australian movie BRINDABELLAS | edge of light in 2016 (see below) had used RED cameras configured for monochrome IR, Dune used an ARI Alexa camera but the basic premise is the same. The usual infrared blocking filter was removed and replaced with a 'black' infrared-pass filter.
The idea with Dune was to show the unreal environment the Harkonnen's inhabited. The first film had only shown interiors but the second part required exterior shots. One significant result of this technique is the surreal look of the characters, since NIR penetrates a few millimetres into skin (and the characters are hairless) and there is the well-known look of people's eyes and the inherent high contrast.
This provides an opportunity to review some of the history of near infrared in feature films.
Infrared film was a useful tool in the motion picture industry as far back as the 1920s. Kodak had produced their first infrared ciné film stock in 1925 and by 1937 it was also available from Agfa and DuPont. Agfa's was the first of what was described as the modern infrared film in that it was not a panchromatic emulsion pushed into infrared sensitivity. The new films were only sensitive to UV and blue and then to extreme red and infrared. This simplified the filter needed and a Wratten #29 (deep red) was the most common used. Sometimes infrared film was used in the making of travelling mattes (used to replace backgrounds in shots) but more often it was used in black and white movies to allow night-time scenes to be shot during the day, a technique now known as 'day-for-night'.
Not all the artefacts of infrared images were welcome however, and special makeup (usually lipstick) and set painting often had to be applied. Sometimes foliage was sprayed with green paint to hide the Wood effect and prevent shifts in tone. Paramount even painted an entire back-lot 'Brownstone Street' in special blue-grey paint called infra-red blue so that it would look the same on both infrared and panchromatic stock. The 1941 DuPont film was welcomed by cinematographers because of its lack of Wood effect and the three apparently competing emulsions had actually found slightly different and complementary niches in this specialised application.
By the 1960s the movie industry was moving from black and white to colour and infrared's abilities for day-for-night shooting were obsolete. But occasionally infrared filming was used for artistic effect.
In the early 1960s there was a curious collaboration between the Cuban and Russian film industries resulting in an extraordinary movie called Soy Cuba (I am Cuba). The director was Mikhail Kalatozov, famous most probably for The Cranes Are Flying in 1957, and the director of photography was Sergey Urusevsky. The film is a cinematic tour de force, featuring several long single-take sequences which almost defy attempts to work out just how they were done.
Much of Soy Cuba was shot using infrared film, with characteristic bright foliage and dark skies. The film stock was actually manufactured for use by the Soviet military, so it was quite a coup for the production to access some of it.
More recently, movie-maker Mike Figgis has been experimenting with low light and infrared photography using consumer video cameras with Sony's Night Shot facility. His 2001 film Hotel includes scenes done this way, to such an extent that the actors in the scenes could not actually see each other during filming.
The director of 2006 movie Wristcutters (A Love Story), Goran Dukic, had intended to use Kodak Ektachrome Infrared extensively to provide the look of the film's afterlife for suicides setting. Kodak provided unique super-16 format stock for this purpose, but after shooting some tests Dukic decided to use post-production techniques rather than infrared film. Some of the test sequences were shown on the film web site and on the published DVD. The production eventually sold off their unique stock for $300 per roll.
In 2015 film makers Glen Ryan and James van der Moezel of silver dory productions in Australia released a movie to exploit the monochrome infrared abilities of the RED digital cinema camera, called BRINDABELLAS | edge of light. It was described as “the World’s first near-infrared feature” and was shot in 4k resolution. I wrote it up in a blog post at the time, and the movie is still available on their web site.
Since most NIR-converted stills cameras can now shoot movies as well, the scope for infrared movies has expanded greatly over the past century.
For a while I have used a near-infrared camera made by FujiFilm called the FinePix IS Pro. This is based on the FinePix S5 Pro, which is in turn based on the Nikon D200 which, for me was useful as I have some Nikkor lenses that fit. (Recently I have been using a converted compact camera, simply because it is convenient, but the Fuji is more versatile. An example shot from Cordoba is above.) It has no blocking filter so you can use any filter combination you want and in my case that included a yellow filter for false-colour IR tests (not 100% satisfactory) and trying a variety of filtration methods. [See this blog post on the subject.]
I had thought that this camera was an experiment that Fuji wouldn't repest but it turns out I was wrong as I came across their X-T1 IR camera. This was first introduced in August 2015, which shows how on the ball I was, or how secretive Fuju are about this device. At 16 megapixels it isn't really up to current specs of course but, based on their web site, it is currently available. Fuji are marketing it carefully to "technical experts, law enforcement, medical research and scientific communities" and I would assume the EULA places restrictions on use as with the IS Pro. In theory the usage can include Fine Art.
So this isn't enough to make me want one, but it does indicate that there is a small market for out-of-the-box IR cameras as well as conversions.
Well, the FUJIFILM GFX100 IR (Infrared) Large Format Mirrorless Digital Camera for a start. No complaints about resolution here because this chap weighs in at 100 megapixels (and maybe even 400!) and has up-to-date features such as 5-axis stabilisation. In this case Fuji say that this camera "will not be made available to general photographers or customers for personal use" and was launched at the end of 2020. Unlike their other IR cameras this one doesn't respond to UV as well.
I was somewhat surprised to see that discount supermarket Aldi's latest catalogue includes a thermal imaging camera. It's probably more expensive than anything else they sell, at £899, but to be honest that's not a bad price for a 320 by 240 resolution camera of this type. The cheapest near equivalent I could quickly track down cost over £2,000. To be honest, if what you want is either to track heat leakage on a building, a hot spot in a circuit or find an animal in the dark then this should be fine. 320 by 240 is even a reasonable resolution for some artistic thermal imaging. Of course going for 640 by 480 or even more will set you back well over £10K, so 320 by 240 is almost hi-res for a thermal device.
The make is Rothenberger who, amongst other things, produce a wide range of imaging/inspection products. The company was founded in Germany in 1949.
You won't see these in store however ... it's an online special only.
For comparison, the current FLIR One camera, which now clocks in at 160 by 120 sells for around £400 and works with your mobile phone.
Last June I had a chance to look at the Flir One thermal add-on for the iPhone. This was based on Flir's tiny Lepton bolometer. This has a resolution of 80 by 60 pixels and is aimed at OEMs to incorporate in various devices.
The latest is an Android mobile phone from Reading UK-based CAT called the S60, which was launched yesterday at the Mobile World Congress.
The CAT literature doesn't mention thermal resolution, although there is some online speculation that Flir's Lepton is now available with 160 by 120 pixel resolution, as reported by Ars Technica last August. Whatever it is, the CAT device seems to make use of the same blending technology that the Flir one uses to give false-resolution to the thermal image, which makes it much more useful. The visible and thermal cameras are also much closer together in the CAT, which will reduce need to correct the parallax errors at close distances that the original Flir One exhibited.
This is still not really of a sufficient 'quality' to be an artistic imaging device, but if you're a plumber, heating engineer or electrician this is a kind of tool that will soon be making its way into your toolbox.
You can see the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones trying one out, and chatting to 'the man from CAT' in this video clip.
I've been hoping to have a closer look at one of the new breed of 'personal' thermal imaging cameras, and with the help of the Royal Photographic Society Journal I have been able to.
You may recall from earlier posts that this version of the FLIR One operates like a case for the iPhone 5 (more versatile versions are imminent) and uses the iPhone for viewing, operations and storage. The FLIR's case fits firmly onto the phone although it is in two parts so the thermal camera part can be easily unclipped if you don't want to carry it with you all the time. Fitting and removing the inner case to the phone is a little tricky and some users report breaking it ... so be careful. Clipped together the device is obviously heavier than the iPhone but not unduly so, and the whole thing still slips easily into a pocket. The two devices communicate via the Lightning connector and the thermal camera does not take any power from the camera; it has its own battery which is charged separately.
To operate the camera you pull down a slider switch half way until it clicks and turn on the free downloaded app. You are then prompted to pull and hold the slider a bit further, to calibrate the camera, after which you're ready to go. It's point and shoot, with options to change the colour palette, hold exposure, and select either a still photo, a panorama, time-lapse or a movie to shoot.
Thermal resolution is low, at 80 by 60 pixels, but the software neatly combines this with information from a coincident (almost) 640 by 480 visual camera, adding something like the Photoshop edges filter to form a hybrid image. For most purposes, this process, called MSX, completely ameliorates the low resolution thermal image. As the two cameras are not completely coincident there will be parallax errors if you shoot close-up. It is possible to correct for this (but sometimes I forgot). You can choose between several colour palettes. A thermal image is monochromatic but adding false colour can help show the distribution of temperatures. You can change the palette of a shot later, but for some reason the camera shrinks the image to 516 by 387 if you do this, which is weird. Another thing to note is that a FLIR logo is added to every image shot, which is slightly intrusive (imagine if Nikon or Canon did this) but is par for the course with their devices.
Straight out of the box you can shoot useful diagnostic images. For example, here is a shot that shows a cold carafe of water in the foreground and in the distance you can see a warm radiator and also the heat trace of warm pipes going up inside the wall above it. This uses a grey palette ... dark is cold and white is hot (relatively, the range is actually 12.8 to 21.2 degrees C).
Here's a shot with the temperature indicator turned on which shows heat spots of a group of transformers powering my broadband and phone equipment (iron palette). The FLIR One has a number of emissivity settings with a matte setting being the recommended one. Emissivity denotes how much infrared thermal radiation something radiates compared to what it should do if it were a theoretical 'black body'. Knowing the emissivity helps you know how accurate a remote temperature measurement is. The FLIR One has four settings for this, from matte to glossy, which is fewer that a fully professional thermal camera might have but is still useful.
I've no doubt a thermal camera such as this is a useful practical tool, especially in DIY for tracing heat loss and heating pipes (amazon.com buyers are notably enthusiastic about this kind of application), but I'm not so sure about its artistic possibilities. The low thermal resolution makes it difficult to take images as atmospheric as those that Joseph Giacomin takes, especially since I couldn't work out how to record only a thermal image with no visual embellishment. That said, it's easy to take fun thermal images and the images certainly attract attention.
I showed the FLIR One to a visiting heating engineer who immediately said he'd ask his boss for one, although for a professional with no need for panoramas or movies the new FLIR C2 [data sheet] is likely to be a better bet, especially since it is a self-contained unit with a similar price point and better analytical features.
The FLIR One in this form factor is available now from places such as the Apple store and Amazon (£180). I would wait for the newer model, which clips to the bottom of an Apple or Android phone or an iPad and should be a bit more future proof. From an artistic point of view I will pass, despite the low price. I think Joseph has convincingly demonstrated that a 640 by 480 thermal image has real artistic possibilities but I am less excited by the low resolution of the FLIR One. However this, and similar cameras, will show whether there is a market for less wallet-busting thermal cameras ... so I am delighted to see it and ignoring my arty pretensions I do think it's an impressive device and really easy to use.
To finish here are a few more results I got from the camera. Click for full size (640 by 480) versions.
The obligatory selfie. Normally with a thermal camera you wouldn't see my eyes through the glasses, but here the special processing does show them.
These thermal wavelengths (of the order of 10 µm) don't go through glass but they will go through some plastics. In this case you can see my hand inside a black bin liner. (The hand isn't touching the bag ... that would be cheating.)
The London Eye from Westminster Bridge. The thing growing out of the guy's head isn't a new tower block ... it's a lamppost on the bridge!
This shot, of the cab of a steam locomotive, demonstrates a colour palette that shows the very hot spots in red.
And finally some movie. Shooting a movie is straightforward, although in some circumstances you should lock the exposure (called span) to avoid changes to the palette mid-shot. The three scenes are of a London tube train (Victoria line) and a subsurface line (Circle etc) ... here you can see how the tube train, which runs deep underground, shows as warmer in relation to the platform than the subsurface one, which is at pretty much the same temperature. The wheels show very hot, as the trains are braking as they come into the stations. The third scene is of a loco at the Yarwell halt on the Nene Valley Railway, running to change ends before pulling a train towards Peterborough. I was surprised to see the hotspot at the front of the loco and by how relatively cool most of it was.
A slight increase in deep red sensitivity would be useful for astronomers wanting to view the universe at the wavelength of hydrogen-alpha: 656.28 nm. Canon produced a camera modified to give similar better response a few years back and Nikon have now also done so, although theirs is a high-resolution full-frame camera. It's the D810A. The older Canon still had some infrared filtering in place so it couldn't be used for infrared photography, but it is unclear whether this is the case with the Nikon. The press release is unclear although DP Review suggests that there is still filtering.
For those of you interested in the BBC's natural history infrared shooting, there is a training film on line where Colin Jackson explains his technique. However, this his team moved on to using modified Canon DSLR cameras rather than 'pure' video cameras so the film is a little out of date.
Finally, a thermal imaging video showing cloud formations across the earth, shot from space at a wavelength of 6.5 µm. (This is worth expanding for a better view.)
Digging around after my piece last week on the FLIR One I discovered that this isn't the only game in town when it comes to relatively inexpensive thermal imagers using smart phones for control.
I have already mentioned Andy Rawson's lo-res device, which I was told about in July 2013. Andy's web site now tells us that they have discontinued the camera because other inexpensive thermal cameras with higher resolution are now available. There was, however, another camera in the pipeline called Hema-Imager from Erik Beall, but this failed to reach its Kickstarter target. I get the feeling that these guys won't be giving up, and I wish them luck.
Israeli company Opgal have produced the Therm-App, which uses an Android phone as controller. This is more expensive that the FLIR One but has a higher thermal resolution (384 x 288 pixels and 7.4 to 14 microns ... which, of course, includes human body temperature) with a current price of $999 (full price $1600). This camera clips onto the back of your phone and connects via a small cable.
California-based Seek Thermal have announced a 206 by 156 pixel thermal camera add-on for both Android and iOS. It connects via micro USB or Lightning (depending on the device)and slots onto the bottom of your smart phone. Examples on their web site look good and so do the specs: vanadium oxide microbolometer detecting between 7.2 and 13 microns. The price, in the US, is $199.
All the companies marketing these inexpensive thermal cameras hope to build a market to help DIY (aka home improvement) by detecting hidden pipes and checking the temperature of food as well as seeing in the dark security.
There may be even more such devices out there ... if you know of one then let me know in the comments.
FLIR's iPhone add-on thermal camera, the FLIR One, which I discussed back in January is now available from the US Apple Store. Availability in other territories should follow.
It turns out that the resolution of the thermal camera is 80 by 60 pixels but this is merged with a 640 by 480 pixel visible light camera and the image is enhanced depending on which mode you use. The image below is a composite image used by FLIR for promotion.
You can see the softness of the thermal information but I have to admit the blend with the visual image makes for a quite usable result.
The cost in the US is $350 and you have to use an iPhone 5 or 5s. The device will not fit on either iPhone 6 and it would seem that FLIR have no plans to produce a new one. That was always the risk but this still brings thermal imaging into a completely new area of use, appealing to small businesses and hobbyists alike.
Gizmodo got their hands on one in August and explain just what you might want to do with it (if you don't know already). They also did a review, but they were unsure whether it's worth the money. Given the usual way tech prices inflate as they cross the Atlantic that may be a bigger issue over here in the UK. That said, to echo one of the commentators on the review, it's still cheap for a thermal imager.
As I was in the West End last week I went over to the new Photographers Gallery just off Oxford Street to have a look at Richard Mosse's extraordinary infrared photographs from the Congo (see the previous post). The good news is they look stunning in the huge prints on show. I was very surprised by just how small the grain in the film is, so I have to assume the aerochrome was actually developed using the 'correct' aerochrome process rather than the E6 most of us used. The bad news is that there are only a handful of the prints on display and I had hoped to see more.
So, I went down to the bookshop in the basement and chatted with the very helpful sales assistant. I had hoped to get a copy of either of the books of Mosse's photos but that was not to be. They are completely sold out, not just at the Gallery but everywhere it seems, and are now selling for high prices.
Despite being disappointed by this (and kicking myself for not buying his Infra book online from Aperture when I could) I got to thinking that this took the book into the realm of photographic collectors items. They may well be the first books of infrared photography to truly get there, and prize-winning photography at that. I know there are a couple of other IR photo books that go for high prices but I think these are in a class of their own.
Changing wavelength, I am getting a little worried that FLIR's inexpensive iPhone add-on thermal camera may be having difficulties. The general consensus in the Apple rumour mill is that the iPhone 6 will be along soon and will have a larger form factor. This means that the FLIR One, as publicised, will be designed to use an obsolescent smart phone body. I still hope that the promise it showed when previewed at CES in January will be realised and it would definitely be a game changer for a wider use of thermal imaging.
The leading manufacturer of thermal images, FLIR, have launched a prosumer thermal imager at CES. I mentioned the $200 IR-Blue in an earlier post but this new device appears to be much more like the existing thermal images we've seen from FLIR and others while having a retail price point of only $350. This is an amazing price point and opens up a whole raft of new applications in a whole new market.
The unit fits onto an iPhone 5 (and 5s) and uses an iPhone app for control, display and recording - including movies - linking via USB. I couldn't find any information on spatial resolution but my guess is that the display is something like 320 pixels across. This is augmented by the ability to blend in a visual image to provide some detail to help identify features. The thermal core is FLIR's Lepton, which is a tiny microbolometer-based unit designed for consumer manufacturing scale. The thermal range for the scene is zero to 100 Celsius with a resolution of a tenth of a degree, which should suffice for most consumer uses and will certainly pick out a person in the dark.
What is telling is that much of the FLIR promotional material is aimed at people who don't even really know what thermal imaging is or what it can do. A thermal image is (IIRC) regarded as a search in the US so there may be privacy concerns but a thermal image of a person does not show any significant detail. (That judgement was based partly on thermal imaging devices not being generally available to the public.) Hopefully we won't see any of the hysteria that greeted near-infrared photography and its so-called (and insignificant) X-Ray capability! Oh, and to save you asking, it's the area between the eyes and the bridge of the nose that best shows the body temperature, not the forehead.
I see this as a really significant piece of kit and welcome FLIR's initiative. Worldwide launch is Spring 2014 'at popular retail outlets'.
A further quick camera-related post. Andrew Back, an enthusiast for open hardware, has been using a Raspberry Pi (the tiny cheap computer) with an unfiltered CMOS imaging chip to shoot night-time wildlife. In this case it's, so far, mostly slugs and bugs caught using time-lapse photography.
The BBC's new natural history series The Great British Year has shown some fascinating, and very artistic, uses of thermal imagery. (Best if you expand the videos ... but sorry they probably won't work outside the UK.)
And there's a movie showing something of the technology.
Shows you don't have to wander the plains of Africa to get exciting thermal footage, and I have to say it's nice to see something more subtle than the usual blue/red heat pattern. Also worth a read (and with the 'usual' colouring in many cases) is a web page on 10 wildlife secrets revealed by thermal cameras ... even a hot plant!
New near-infrared cameras are few and far between and there is an increasing choice of thermal imagers, even if they tend (with a notable exception) to be very expensive. However, cameras working in the gap between the two are much rarer beasts.
Episensors of Bolingbrook, Illinois have announced a new camera working in the short wave infrared (which lies just beyond photographic/near infrared) and which is intriguing, not just because they describe it as 'low cost' (not sure just how low) but also because of its versatility. Here's a paragraph from their press-release.
The infrared camera company Episensors, Inc. recently launched a new type of portable infrared camera called the Night SWEEP-1 (“NS-1”). Infrared cameras can see light that is invisible to the human eye and provide imaging at night and through obscurants like smoke and fog. What sets NS-1 apart is its portability and customizability, which allows scientists, researchers, and others to utilize the camera in the field, without sacrificing the capability of swapping between short-wave, mid-wave and long-wave infrared focal plane arrays, lenses and other components. Based on a patent-pending design, this infrared camera system is fully customizable. The camera can be configured with a pour fill Dewar or a closed cycle Integrated Dewar Cooler Assembly (IDCA) depending on the customer’s preference.
An excellent technical note on their web site explains the wavelength domain this camera covers. It's notable not just because the user can change the imaged band but that the extended SWIR (short-wave-ir) band, between 1 and 3 µm (1000 and 3000 nm) not only has some haze and smoke penetration ability but also contains a sweet spot where there is some smoke penetration but also the radiation goes through glass. Output resolution is 320 by 256 with plans for 640 by 512. The digital resolution is 14 bit and I assume having a supercooled sensor (that Dewar referred to in the note is a thermos flask of something like liquid nitrogen) will give a low noise floor.
So this camera is a kind of infrared SLR and operates between photographic infrared (which ends around 1500 nm) and the thermal bands and operates using reflected radiation (from the sun for example) while thermal imagers show radiation from the objects themselves. I believe this mid-infrared imaging is sometimes referred to as reflectography and has applications in art restoration amongst other things.
Check out the videos on the web site. They look like photographic infrared rather than thermal but you will notice some smoke penetration. It'll come down to particle size and by configuring the camera the user will be able to balance haze and smoke penetration against things like glass transparency. The nearest I've seen to this in other devices is where a single unit combines two different cameras.
Whether we will see the NS1 on this side of the Atlantic is currently debatable as some of the technology is export-restricted.
Camera manufacturers tend to be coy about releasing the spectral response of their sensors: they're (logically) more concerned about how the camera as a whole performs than how the sensor might deal with infrared (or UV).
A peek behind that curtain has come courtesy of Christian Mauer of the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne. His thesis Measurement of the spectral response of digital cameras with a set of interference filters (January 2009) is interesting in its own right but if you work your way down to Appendix A page 81 (section A.1.7) you will find the spectral response of a Canon EOS 450D without its IR blocking filter. It shows the usual bump in blue response just beyond 650 nm so that the respective responses of the red, green and blue channels at 800 nm are around 20%, 30% and 40% of the peak green response (at 540 nm) respectively. All channels come together at 20% at 850 nm and the response is monochromatic beyond that.
These figures are actually showing the spectral response of the sensor plus its Beyer filtering, since the underlying sensor is monochromatic and should have a smooth response curve peaking at around 600 nm and slowly dying away to over 1000 nm. However, this explains the strange colours when you take infrared images through a 720 nm filter and why ones through an 850 nm or longer filter are colourless.
Back in April, I wrote about the Leaf Credo wide spectrum backs which had been set up to shoot near infrared out of the box at resolutions up to 80 megapixels. Yair Shahar (from Leaf) and I spent a couple of hours on Primrose Hill in London trying the 60 megapixel version out with both a Mamiya body and a technical camera.
The image as shot with the 60 mp back is an extraordinary 8984 by 6732 pixels. With a suitable lens the resolution is also impressive, giving scope for huge detailed prints. To give you an idea, here is a 6200 by 4000 crop from a shot through a 950 nm filter looking south from Primrose hill directly towards the Shard.
If I zoom in on this until you're looking at it pixel for pixel, this is what you see just to the left of centre on the horizon, between the two dark buildings to the left of the Shard.
This was with a Mamiya 80m lens (half a second at f9, ISO 50). With a technical camera lens the image was even sharper. I have found that infrared can produce very interesting cloud images even on an overcast day, presumably because of a different balance between the brightness of the ground/trees (which show up bright in infrared due to the Wood Effect) and the cloud base. You can focus using live view with this back, which is pretty well essential for such a shot, as is a tripod. The back has no anti-aliasing filter. In general you don't need one for landscapes although there was one distant building in the scene we shot that exhibited some moiré, which was easily removed/disguised.
I had hoped to be able to do more infrared tests with the Credo during July but, unfortunately, it wasn't possible due to my work load. But the main point is made by the brief trip to the top of Primrose Hill, which is that you can produce dramatic landscapes with this kit. I'd love to see what a real landscape photographer could come up with, given more time and better weather. The Credo WS back is also proving of interest in art conservation and for forensics. There is a lot to be said for the 'shoot first and examine later' ability of very high resolution images.
[My thanks to Leaf and Yair Shahar for their help with this test.]
One of the photographs included in the Infrared 100 exhibition was by Carol Highsmith. She's been going round the USA for the Library of Congress with a medium format camera with a digital back and has shot some fantastic infrared images ... and in the digital world medium format means resolutions of 40 megapixels and more. In Carol's case her back had to be converted but Leaf have now announced a wide spectrum medium format back 'out-of-the-box' called the Leaf Credo WS ... for wide spectrum.
Leaf's leaflet (!) [info on their web site] explains that you can use the back to shoot infrared with an infrared-pass filter, normal images with an infrared blocking filter and Infrarcolor with an orange/red filter. (By this I assume they mean the faux colour images we're used to seeing.) The back may also shoot UV but I don't know that for sure as yet and it is very lens dependent. There are two versions with resolutions of 60 and 80 megapixels. 80 megapixels is 10,320 by 7752 pixels.
A wide spectrum camera is great news (although this one will probably set you back over £30 thousand) and a back like this can be used on bodies such as Mamiya (who own Leaf) or technical cameras and Leaf rightly point out that since you don't work with a viewfinder on a technical camera (you use a screen in place of the imaging plane) the built-in hires screen on the back will be very handy.
You probably know that all digital sensors are sensitive to near-infrared and that most cameras block out infrared to avoid contaminating the colours. I found that my iPhone camera is indeed sensitive to IR and could clearly see the infrared emitters from a headphone loop system at a conference I recently attended.
I had wondered many years ago whether flooding a cinema screen with infrared could hamper anyone wanting to film the movie from the screen. Back in the days of poor filtering this may well have worked but I suspect filtering would remove the infrared with modern cameras.
Apple have applied for a patent for a mechanism that carries a code in an infrared signal 'broadcast' at a venue, decoding it in the phone (or other device) and using the result to determine whether the camera should be deactivated. This is a similar idea to the coding that prevents scanners and photocopiers from copying banknotes. The BBC carried a story reporting that rapper Tinie Tempah was against this idea because he likes his fans to video his concerts (a bit like the Grateful Dead for those of us a little older ... the Dead used to set aside an area in front of the stage for fans who wanted to record their concerts). Apple's system would be optional: it would be up the venue/performer to use it to disable cameras.
Some of the artists interviewed by the BBC had a simple view. They didn't mind being videoed but they thought their fans should actually be enjoying the concert instead.
Of course Apple could configure the iPhones to receive those headphone loops (usually helpful to people with impaired hearing). That would be nice: you could use your own headphones.
Further to my note about a infrared version of the Olympus EP1 being seen at a show, we have tried to get some further information from Olympus about this and, sadly, we got nowhere. This probably means that yes, there is one ... but there is only one and it's not a product.
You can guess my feelings about manufacturers missing a trick with the potential market for well-configured infrared cameras.
The aim may be to provide a rapid energy audit of buildings but MIT have a thermal imaging system that is interesting for purely visual reasons.
The full story is in this news piece on their web site, complete with video.
Here's what caught my eye ...
The new process begins by photographing buildings with a system the team developed to get high-resolution, long wave infrared images using an inexpensive, low-resolution camera. Normally, the cost of high-resolution far-infrared cameras is prohibitive for such widespread use — such cameras can cost $40,000 each. As a substitute, the team developed a novel patent-pending technology called “Kinetic Super Resolution” that uses a computer to combine many different images taken with an inexpensive low-resolution IR camera (costing less than $1,000), that produces a high-resolution mosaic image.
Note that in this context 'high resolution' would be 640 by 480 pixels resolution for $40K. In this case the MIT system's Kinetic Super Resolution improves image resolution by using moving (presumably this means scanning) images. I would imagine that this is trading temporal resolution for spatial resolution by looking at how successive pixels differ when these pixels are displaced by less than pixel/image resolution. A patent is pending.
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