Digital infrared photography with Better Light large format digital cameras.Decades ago I did infrared photography with a 35mm camera using the traditional red IR filter. Now I am gradually realizing the potential of CCD digital sensors and digital imaging software to achieve special effects with digital cameras. This has led me to increased interest in large format tri-linear scanners. The BetterLight scan-back is especially adept at accomplishing infrared because you can so easily take off the IR filter. With most other digital cameras you can’t remove their IR filter from the sensor. Michael Sullivan is a leader in using a BetterLight for digital infrared photography. It is from his white paper on the BetterLight.com website that you can find the most information.
So Rebekah Corbin-Teich and I took the BetterLight over to the Northern Aegean island of Lemnos (Limnos), off the coast of Greece. It is reachable from Thessaloniki, where FLAAR is consultant to a growing giclee atelier of the Granis brothers. Traveling internationally with a complete large format digital camera system is a test of everyone’s patience. Airport screeners are clueless, even in Europe. In Amsterdam they were convinced that the battery had easily accessible acid in it and that someone could attack passengers with this acid. This was about the stupidest waste of security that I have heard in recent time. Fortunately the pilot and First Officer of the plane had some brains and realized that Professor Hellmuth, and his battery, was no problem to anyone. While on the subject of removing the filters from digital cameras
There is a unique B&W dedicated digital camera now available. This camera has the Bayer Pattern RGB filters removed. This is by no means a replacement whatsoever for using the BetterLight for infrared photography. The BetterLight can do panoramas which can be enlarged to immense sizes. And the BetterLight system can blend an infrared photograph with a full-color photograph to achieve superior results. You can’t do this with most medium format digital backs. The B&W dedicated digital camera is medium format, not large format, and is a 1-shot CCD not a tri-linear scanning CCD. Actually there is now a second medium format infrared option, Phase One P65+ IR, from Capture Integration. If you are passionate about B&W photography, you ought to consider them both. But for pure infrared digital photography, and for full-color digital photography, this is what the BetterLight system is really good at accomplishing.
And for doing B&W, the BetterLight can also be used, just use Channel Mixer option in Adobe Photoshop. Don’t use digital cameras in black-and-white mode; take the shot in color and transfer it in Adobe Photoshop. And here don’t use the auto mode change to Grayscale. Channel Mixer option is vastly superior. Infrared possibilities with medium format digital cameras such as Phase OneWe are adding a new page on medium format infrared. Just realize that large-format (such as BetterLight) offers unique capabilities, such as Pano/WideVue, not as easy to accomplish with medium format. Infrared possibilities with adapted Nikon camerasFLAAR will issue comments on retrofitting Nikon digital cameras for handling infrared later this year. Infrared possibilities with new Fuji digital camerasFuji is the first digital camera company to offer special models for infrared. FLAAR will cover these later this year. We begin first with BetterLight for infrared since this is a sophisticated system with a good reputation and is an exciting digital photography technology to work with.
Most recently updated February 13, 2009.
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