IR digital camera mod

posted Aug 13th 2005 9:30am by Eliot Phillips
filed under: digital cameras hacks

infrared camera

We’ve featured IR webcams before, but this is Fuji FinePix 2300 still camera that has been modified to take IR photos. The site has a pretty thorough walk through of the disassembly and has all of the warnings you’d expect. Once the IR filter is removed (or broken in this case) it is replaced by at least two layers of material cut from exposed 35mm negatives. From the sample pictures it looks like it works well. I kinda wish I had been an early adopter so I’d have a worthless camera laying around right now to tear open.

[thanks Captain seduction]

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Comments [8]

Reader Comments

For those that might want to do it to their Nikon D70:
http://www.astrosurf.org/buil/d70/ircut.htm

Posted at 10:50 am on Aug 13th, 2005 by Christopher Flynn

Eeek. looking at the pictures of the disassembly of the nikon d70 makes me feel a little faint… and i thought cleaning the ccd was a big deal.

Posted at 11:29 am on Aug 13th, 2005 by Bucky

Downed pictures- unless many others linked to this, could it be a sign that hackaday is joining the infamous ranks of slashdot and drudgereport as completely bombing sites? probably not, but its fun to think so

Posted at 2:02 pm on Aug 13th, 2005 by Jfalk

now to switch out the flash to be an IR emitter/illuminator…

Posted at 2:03 pm on Aug 13th, 2005 by HOUS68

Of course you might just want to stick the exposed negs over your lens first to see if your camera even has a hot mirror. Negs over lens works fine with my old oly D 340. But then you can’t surreptitiously take IR fotos that way, can you?

Posted at 4:06 pm on Aug 13th, 2005 by Robert Bigfoot

Does anyone want to go on a group buy for some IR LEDs. They’re 3cents a piece but $25 base shipping. I’m hoping to get a group together so the shipping isnt so imposing. Email me if you’re interested.

Justins.junk@gmail.com

Posted at 4:28 pm on Aug 14th, 2005 by justin

Wow… Never really thought my home server would need to serve that much content. What was normally a 40-80KB size log file turned into a 20MB log file. I haven’t checked this site out in a few days. But my friend pointed this out as the possible source for the surge of traffic.

Any ways I modified my Minolta Z2. No 35mm film though. Because this is my nice camera I am going to buy a Hoya IR Cut and IR Pass filter that will go in front of the lens.

To sum up a few of the questions. The camera flash does emit IR light. The problem with using the same trick to only pass IR light from the flash by sticking the film in front is the flash gets too hot. If you look at my first pic of the camera you can see the flash is covered. Two problems arose from this. The plastic film started to melt and the emulsion started to cook. Also it passed too much visible light which really defeats the purpose of using this as an IR camera, especially if you are going to use it for covert operations. You could get a professional gel and cut it to size, like that Hoya filter I mentioned above. Further modification would be required to make it fit into the flash housing. Or you could go with the IR LED option. $23 for 100 non-visible (Stealth) high output LEDs on eBay with free shipping.

I got an e-mail question about this. He wanted to know if this was truly IR photos or is it just looking like IR because of the brownish purplish tint of the negative material used.

When you finish the project and take the remainder of the 35mm film, hold it in front of the camera. It looks like it is nearly transparent. I could only see the outline of the film. If you take 3 strips of the exposed film and layer it on top of each other and hold it up to the sun, you can’t see anything except a real faint red dot. So it is nearly blocking the entire visible spectrum. So yes, this is truly IR photography. Just pop that bad boy into B&W mode and take some awesome pics.

When I get my 52mm filters I am going to take some photos with my Minolta Z2 and see how well it works.

Posted at 8:33 pm on Aug 14th, 2005 by ka nai`a

very sweet

Posted at 10:55 am on Aug 15th, 2005 by wolff