Infrared Dance Photography

Whilst covering a dance-based fashion show recently, I decided to whip out my infrared camera and take a few dozen shots. It all worked out better than I expected. The camera was particularly partial to dancers bathed in red artificial light - something that my visible-light camera has little appreciation for. See the flickr set for more of this sort of thing.

Infrared-converted Canon 400D: First Impressions

I recently became the proud owner of an infrared-converted Canon EOS 400D. Here are some first impressions:

Sensitivity: As you'd expect from an IR-conversion, the camera is very sensitive to infrared. Exposure time is pretty close to normal photography.

Auto exposure: Exposure is consistently off by about 1 stop, which can be easily corrected using exposure compensation. Dynamic range appears less than for visible-light photography, so highlights are unlikely to be clipped when using auto exposure (assuming RAW-mode).

Resolution: Since green and blue sensors are fairly insensitive to infrared, most detail in infrared photography comes from the red channel - reducing resolution by a third or so. Nevertheless, there seems to be plenty of detail in the images I captured, at least when compared to the Ricoh GX100 I was using previously.

White Balance: As is normal for infrared photography, use of auto exposure results in very red images. Custom white balance works well, leading to largely greyscale images.

Lenses: Canon 50mm f/1.8 and Canon 100mm f/2.8 both work well, with no hotspots. Sigma's 30mm f/1.4 also gives nice images, although does produce very mild hotspots for some apertures. I'll be giving these, and other lenses, a more thorough seeing to in the (hopefully) near future.

Below are some sample images:

Sigma 30mm @ f7.1

Sigma 30mm @ f2

Canon 50mm @ f/2.5

Ricoh Caplio GX100

Who needs an HA-2 adapter when you have a kitchen roll?

Recently I became the proud owner of an-IR converted DSLR. However, prior to this I took all my infrared shots using a Ricoh Caplio GX100 fitted with a Hoya R72 filter. This post is a homage to this little friend of mine.
The GX100 is a high-end compact with a built in zoom lens. The compact-sized sensor means that selective focus will always remain a distant dream, but the lens is very sharp and produces great images for a compact camera. Images can be saved in raw format, which is a real boon for infrared photography. Filters can be fitted using the optional HA-2 adapter. As you would expect for small optional plastic bits, this is somewhat over-priced. If you fancy something cheaper, I found the cardboard tube from a kitchen role to be a quite capable replacement when I first bought the camera.

Unprocessed, auto white balance

Unprocessed, custom white balance

Red and blue layers swapped

Compared to many compacts, the Ricoh's sensor is relatively sensitive to infrared. However, it still requires exposure times in the region of 8-16 seconds for an intermediate aperture setting on a sunny day, i.e. tripod territory. The lens does produce hotspots for certain aperture sizes, but this is generally avoidable given that everything is pretty much in focus for all aperture settings.
The GX100 can produce some pretty decent infrared images with minimal post-processing. Some examples images are shown on the left.
With auto white balance, the raw images have a deeply red tint (see top image). This can be removed in post-processing, but it is easier and generally more effective to set a custom white balance before shooting.
False colour does not usually appear in the Ricoh's unprocessed images, but a slightly-off custom white balance can lead to some interesting tonality. The second image, for example, was taken using a custom white balance set several hours previously.
The final image shows the effect of swapping the red and blue layers in the GIMP, followed by a little levels adjustment to improve contrast.

For more examples, see this Flickr set.