Infrared Photography (1 Viewer)

I appreciate this is not birds or wildlife but as you are all so helpful I wonder if anyone has advice.

My old 4500 was sitting in the cupboard doing nothing and I was even considering getting rid of it. At a photo talk the other day I heard someone say that if you put a infrared filter in front of an old digital you will get good photos.

I bought a Hoya r72 filter (which you cant see through) and a stepping ring from SRB, connnected it to the 4500 on auto everything, pointed it out the window and amazingly got a reasonable infrared photo. It even auto focussed.

The next step is to improve the results. Has anyone any experience of this technique or can point me towards a good technical website.

Lots of gubbins from search on Google. Here's a dpreview thread where someone gives a few links :
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1007&message=6347627

As I understand it your camera, if anything, is actually a bit new for infrared photography as it stands since, like most newer models, it has quite an effective "hot mirror" in front of the camera sensor (the hot mirror blocks out near infrared which is generally unwanted for visible light photography). This probably means you won't be able to do handheld IR photography with your camera (which is generally the case for unmodified cameras).

It's also possible (though not so sure about this) that the hot mirror may be too effective to work well with the r72 and your sensor to give "colour" infrared photos: the situation where there is a particular balance between the r72 filter and the hot mirror such that the red, green and blue sensors are differently affected :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/b-thomas/500144790/

If you ever come to consider the 4500 worthless you may consider modifying it . Instructions here for earlier models in this series (which may only be of limited use) :
http://www.abe.msstate.edu/~jwooten/camera/lense.html
http://www.lifepixel.com/IR.htm

Be interested to see a sample photo.

Check out this website:
http://www.wrotniak.net/photo/infrared/index.html

It has a bunch of links at the bottom for even more info.

Myself, I have a Cokin infrared filter (mounts in a Cokin filter holder in front of the lens). Some folks complain that it lets light in thru the side on the long exposures, but I found it to work quite well, and it seems easy enough to cover the edges of the holder with a slim piece of cloth (like a sock) draped over it.

My only problem came in that when I converted the images to greyscale, the results didn't look all that much different from regular greyscale images. For example, white buildings still look white. Maybe I need to include more trees and clouds.

To think that I only put this out a couple of hours ago. Thank you all for your comments and all I can now do is try it out and see if it works.