Infrared retrospective
I just sent a spare µ4/3 camera body off to Protech Photographic in Crowborough to have it converted to “full spectrum” for Infrared work. Meantime, I thought it might be fun to go back over some of my earlier IR stuff, captured off somewhat lesser cameras.
My earliest adventures into IR date way back to the turn of the century, when I had a Sony “Mini-DV” Digital Video camera on loan from a customer. Those things always had an eerie greenish hue in IR mode, and the quality was distinctly Lo-Fi and generally a bit crap. Which kinda added to the effect, I think. Though it was the spooky “Man Who Fell to Earth” eyes that intrigued me most about IR photography, back then…
Most of my experience so far with IR has been from taking stills from cheapie ONVIF-compatible PTZ IP cameras. These are dirt cheap and considering the cost, the image quality isn’t too bad – often full HD or better. Many have standard ¼”-20 female tripod thread. This means you can mount them on a tripod. Or as I have done with all our internal IP cams, mount them on Arca Swiss (well Arca Chinese actually). This means all my security cam mounts can be used for standard digital stills cameras and visa versa.
You can use something like IP Centcom’s Onvier on your mobile to pan, tilt, zoom and capture from the camera, using your smartphone. And something like the KDE project’s KDEConnect (free open source) to squirt the images and/or video clips to your PC/Mac. Or if you already have Zoneminder or similar you can capture from that using any modern browser on any modern OS. And almost all these devices have their own integral web server too. The built-in web interfaces are generally rather poor, and often a tad flaky, but they have the advantage of needing no additional software at all.
Cheap and cheerful
I love these things. They are incredibly versatile bits off kit. They also are cheap enough to hack about and take a soldering iron to, if you want it to do something it won’t do “out of the box“. Example, the cam that captured the pic of our back yard has a ring of IR LEDS that kick-in when it goes into “night mode”. Unfortunately because this camera is inside the window, these IR LED’s reflect off the glass of the window. So I simply dismantled it, un-soldered the LED board and screwed it back together again. I then set-up another automatic IR cluster, pointing out of another window. Works a treat! 
That camera was a real cheapie – has a fixed MF 3.5mm lens, and cost £10, new on eBay. And of course, by separating the IR from the camera, it means spiders don’t build their webs over the lens. Like this fellow keeps doing on our front cam. This is a “sealed” and supposedly “weatherproof” PTZ unit. Seems midges are attracted to the IR. So spiders tend to build their webs – or self-filling larders close by. Like this fellow does – captured late one evening as he popped out to get his dinner…
Accidental SFX
The better PTZ ip cams have 30x zooms and will focus from a few centimetres to infinity. With a little persuasion, they can create some pretty wacky “edge case” FX, if you like that sort of thing…
Some of the strangest shots can happen when the camera cannot quite make up its mind what mode it wants. In this instance it was still in IR mode, but the rest of the camera was in full colour mode…
Finally, another screen capture from the IR camera overlooking our back yard, with the camera facing north east, snapped as the near-full moon struggled its way through the gathering storm-clouds…
More infrared fun to follow, when my DMC-GH2 comes back from being converted…
