Converting a camera to infrared

- These days I'm mostly shooting with a Fuji mirrorless camera, so I've got a bunch of lenses for my Fuji system, and I have ended up with an extra body. And right now as I'm saying that I realize that almost sounds suspicious, I didn't steal it or anything like that, there are just times when you end up with an extra camera body. Maybe because you upgraded to a new camera, to a new model, and so, you've got an older one. And so you might be wondering, well, what am I gonna do with this extra camera? I kept this one because I thought, "Oh, I'll have a second body, "then I can keep my wide angle lens on one body, "and my telephoto on the other, "and I'll look really cool as I'm walking around." and I completely forgot that I'm incredibly lazy, and that I'm not gonna carry two camera bodies around, I just don't do it.

I just don't do it. And I try to get myself to do it, and it's just, I just don't. So, then of course there's eBay, I could put it on eBay and a lot of cameras will hold their value, but after a point, there is a point of diminishing returns, where it's almost just not worth it, because maybe you'll get a 100 bucks or something. But then it's really hard to let go 'cause you go, "Well, it's a perfectly good camera, "do I really only want $100 for it?" So you end up with these extra bodies. There is something you can do with an extra body, that's pretty interesting, and that is to turn it into an infrared camera.

We've talked about infrared here before, there are ways of shooting infrared involving putting lenses on the end of your filters, not lenses on the end of your filters, I guess you could look at it that way, or filter on the end of your lenses, either way, that will allow you to shoot infrared but will require very, very long exposure times. It's possible to send your camera off to a service that will adapt it so that it is actually sensitive to infrared light, and when you do that you're able of, you're capable of shooting infrared pictures at normal shutter speeds, and this gives you a tremendous amount of flexibility, and it's a lot of fun.

and it's a lot of fun. In infrared, vegetation takes on these wild tones, skies become much more dramatic. It's a very different way of shooting, and so, I've decided to take this camera and have it converted to infrared. There have been lots of services that do this down through the years, there's now a company that's called LifePixel, that's L,I,F,E pixel, that offers a very comprehensive service with a lot of options, and they have a really good website. And so, I've decided to use them to convert this Fuji X-E2 to infrared.

I'm gonna just walk through their website real quick here, to let you see what some of the options are, and explain a couple of them and you'll get to hear my, kinda decision making process for how I'm gonna get through some of these options. They take you first through a video here that shows the same scene shot with different infrared filters. Infrared is not a specific frequency of light, it's a range of light, that sits just beyond the frequencies that we can see with our eyes. You can see they offer several different filters that they can shove into your camera here.

Here at the top you see image from a normal camera, then the Deep Black and White IR filters, Standard IR, Enhanced IR, Super Color IR, Super Blue IR, Full Spectrum, the reason for all of these is that infrared is not a single frequency of light, it's a spectrum of it's own, just beyond what we can see with our eyes. And these different filters, filter very particular parts of that infrared spectrum, and so, give very different results. And as I look here, in this straight from the camera column, these other columns are post production effects that they have applied, I'm just worried about this first column right now.

I'm just worried about this first column right now. Down here at the Full Spectrum I get an image that looks almost full color, except the color is really weird, so you can see I'm getting a lot of different effects from these different filters. I'm not that interested in shooting weird color, the reason I want an infrared camera is to give me more options when I'm shooting black and white. What I'm gonna get with infrared is the ability to really push some tones around, in a way that I wouldn't normally be able to do. Mostly it's gonna affect skies, with an infrared camera I'm gonna be able to get really dark skies that are very, very contrasty.

that are very, very contrasty. To get a sky as dark from a normal image as I'm gonna be able to get from an infrared camera is going to be very hard. Because normally I would have to bring the tones of the sky down so far that I would start to see a lot of tone breaks and posterization and things. So I get a lot more options for black and white shooting when I'm working an infrared, and that's the part I'm interested in. If you're interested in color work, you're gonna wanna pay a lot of attention to these filters down at the bottom of the table. I'm gonna go, I think, with the Super Color IR, and the reason is, that I actually want some color information to make my black and white conversions easier.

to make my black and white conversions easier. If I click on one of these images I see a more detailed explanation of it, including exactly which infrared frequency it's filtering, that means nothing to me, but I'm looking forward to being able to toss that number around so that I sound like kinda a scientist. I can download a raw version of this file and I did that, and if I open it up in Camera Raw I can play around with it and get a sense of what kind of editing controls I'm gonna have with the stuff coming out of this filter.

So, it doesn't look color here, this particular image looks mostly red, this is pretty typical of an infrared image, except that I'm seeing a tremendous variation here, in the vegetation versus everything else in the image. And that's gonna be great for when I'm editing, because it's gonna allow me to really isolate green tones in my image from blue tones, and all the other stuff, and I'm thinking that's gonna be a real boon to my black and white conversion. So that's the filter I wanna go with, again, you're gonna need to decide what it is you want from infrared and then look at these filters and try and figure out what's gonna give you the best results.

what's gonna give you the best results. The LifePixel website does a good job of walking you through the different potentials of all of these different filters. Another thing to do is to go out on the web and look for infrared work and see what you like. That will give you maybe a better idea of what's possible and what you might wanna zero in on, in terms of filter choice. After you've made that decision, there are some other things to consider. Some of them are kinda bad news, depending on the kinda camera you're working with. Infrared wavelengths of light are longer than normal, visible wavelengths of light, that means you have to focus a lens in a different place when you're shooting in infrared, than you normally would with visible light.

than you normally would with visible light. Unfortunately, the autofocus systems in most cameras, and even the lens markings on the focus ring on a lens, if your lens has focus marking, those are not calibrated for infrared, they're calibrated for visible light. LifePixel will go through and calibrate you camera so that its autofocus mechanism can work in infrared. And they talk you through this on their website and have some interesting information here. The bad news is you calibrate for a specific focal length.

So they say that their standard calibration is to calibrate, on Canon for a 50mm lens, on Nikon for an 18-70mm lens, and so what that means is, your autofocus may only work with that focal length when you get it back. Now, if your camera supports live view, that's a different story, because live view is working off of information that's already been gathered by the sensor, and adjusting focus accordingly, so in live view you can focus just fine without calibration.

This is a mirrorless camera, meaning it's live view all the time, so I don't have to worry about this autofocus step, I don't have to make any kinds of decision. If I was having an SLR converted, I would want to read this section very carefully. They offer something called universal calibration, which again, is getting back into the live view thing, so read through that, you may find out that you'll calibrate for a 50mm lens and just assume you're gonna use live view with all of your other lenses. Lot of good information here. Then I got to what is for me, personally, some bad news, and that has to do with hot spots.

and that has to do with hot spots. Most lenses when you're shooting infrared have a big, bright circle in the middle, not most lenses, a lot of lenses, will have a big, bright circle right in the middle. I have encountered this myself when shooting infrared with other processes. So, they give you a nice table here of which lenses they've tested and which ones have trouble. You can find that right underneath this paragraphs that starts "Unfortunately," and they say, "We are compiling a list of lenses "we recommend people avoid, "as they have been proven to have hot spots." And when I come down here to the Fuji section they basically say avoid the kit lens, that I walk around with all the time, and avoid pretty much the lens that I switch to when I take the kit lens off, and that's the excellent 10-24 that Fuji makes.

and that's the excellent 10-24 that Fuji makes. I have a bunch of prime lenses, I've got some other zoom lenses so I'm feeling okay, it's just frustrating that the lenses that I always carry with me aren't gonna work. So, there's some more information here but for the most part those are the main concerns. You're gonna need to pick a filter, and you're gonna do that based on the type of infrared work that you wanna do. You're gonna need to think about lens calibration, if you don't have, say a Canon 50 1.8, you might need to get one, or it may just be that you'll put your zoom lens on and know that you need to work at the 50mm focal length.

That 50mm 1.8 that they calibrate for is a great lens, and it doesn't cost that much so it might even be worth investing in just for your infrared camera. Next thing is to ship it off and have it done, and I haven't done that and I'm really looking forward to it. So unfortunately I can't show you any results yet, you're just gonna have to wait and see what it's like when the camera comes back, just like I'm gonna have to wait and see, and I'm really impatient about this.