I remember my first digital camera. I think it was a somewhat pricey ($200) point and shoot. It was around 2002 or 2003. It was so awesome to get "scans" off the camera with just an SD card... but, it had it's drawbacks. It was 3.1MP which was fine for most stuff at the time, but it had this awful way of rendering colors and a few months after I got it some kind of hardware broke in it making video and preview mode "broken" in some way. Basically what you saw was NOT what you got in preview mode, typically with way less exposure on preview.. and movie mode always looked weird, as if it had lost half of the bits of color info or something.

Anyway, I kept it and ended up digging it up in 2010 from a box of old stuff to crack it open and make it an IR camera. Something went wrong, so now it's fixed focus at ~3ft, and with a few bits of dust permanently on the sensor... but, it worked! The focus issue prevents it from being very useful, but it's really cool as it is VERY sensitive to both IR and UV light. Using a very deep 920nm IR filter with it, I have to decrease exposure on a bright day or it's blown out... and it can very easily see UV patterns on things inside when the sun is out. I have a faded shirt that looks just black, but with the camera it can see the original lettering etc as if it were new... but also it looks magenta rather than black. Even with tungsten lights, the IR sensitivity is stronger than normal light and can end up with some crazy pictures that have "color" but not true color.

Here's some example pictures:

* https://i.imgur.com/5ZKmgFm.jpg reading text on a letter through an opaque black shirt (UV/IR illuminated through windows) * https://i.imgur.com/IYzdhXP.jpg an out of focus look out of my house on a summer day (notice red leaves, brown grass) * https://i.imgur.com/STSPbq5.jpg IR "enhanced" portrait in a car. Her hair is deep red and the coat she's wearing is black and white only. * https://i.imgur.com/7gSzCTT.jpg looking partially through a deep IR filter

The only good UV-only photos I have tend to be flash pictures. The built in xenon flash appears to output enough UV that it will burn through IR filters. It definitely appears to be UV though because of different colors used and the way certain things will fluoresce

I've done some film B/W IR photography but with film it's so temperamental and I've never gotten good IR-only (though a deep red filter can be nice) pictures. There is Aerochrome, which is getting harder and harder to find for color IR pictures on film, but even it is hard to predict (though requires less filtration) and very expensive these days.

user:	earlz
created:	June 27, 2012
karma:	1.0k
about:	I do programming and electronics stuff. My blog is at http://earlz.net My email address is earlz -at- my-blog's-domain-name