>Whenever shooting a subject with a mixture of visible and infrared light, it becomes readily apparent that infrared light focuses differently from visible light. For many subjects, this can mean having to choose between crisp visible contours and an odd pink glow, or blurred edges with some unusual pink features inside. Some things never look sharp no matter where you move the focus.
The extent of this effect is very lens dependent. It also occurs in different colours of visible light too, depending on how well the lens design accounts for it. Optically, the term is "Chromatic Aberration" - lens designers try and account for it in the visible spectrum with optical design and lens coatings, and modern designs are generally extremely well corrected in the visible spectrum. _Usually_ designers aren't worried about the design correctly handing convergence into IR and UV, so how well designs focus them to the same point as the visible spectrum is hit or miss. There's specialist lenses out there that are designed specifically for wide spectrum apochromatism, but they tend to be special purpose and very expensive - especially if they handle UV.
The author mentions it at the bottom of the post as something they're interested in trying out, but I've found it very fun to play with dual bandpass filters - they pass a part of the Visible Spectrum + IR, which creates some interesting options in editing for visual display. There's an example in this set I shot with different filters - https://www.reddit.com/r/infraredphotography/comments/1dnki0...
dheera
Related project: I shot a lot of landscapes in Iceland using a thermal (long wave IR) camera to show geologic phenomena in action. This involved stitching together a lot of (narrow FOV) thermal images and overlaying it on top of visible camera images for context.
One thing I've wondered about is IR fluorescence photography.
I've seen some examples in document forensics where a page that looks blank (or at least the ink is unrecognizably smudged) because of water exposure is completely legible with an infrared photo illuminated by UV.
I suspect there must be a hidden world only visible in IR and UV (and long-wave IR, e.g. "thermal").
NoiseBert69
You’re considering whether it would be possible - and perhaps quite elegant - to use an XY‑scanner to raster‑scan the end of an optical fiber across a prism, disperse the light, and then capture the resulting spectrum with a CCD line sensor.
With that setup, each pixel on the line sensor would effectively record the full spectral content of the light at that scanned position, all in a single acquisition.
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fraywing
This is really cool -- pedantically, I've always thought "full spectrum" is actually misleading from a traditional photographic sense. Like IR + visible light + UV != full spectrum. I'd love to see post-processed imagery of every-day life through an extended view of broader EM energy (similar to astrophotography)... like what does a city scene look like with x-rays and microwaves included?
Side note: have always loved this image https://imgur.com/NZjWfWT of rainbows with UV and IR visible.
>Whenever shooting a subject with a mixture of visible and infrared light, it becomes readily apparent that infrared light focuses differently from visible light. For many subjects, this can mean having to choose between crisp visible contours and an odd pink glow, or blurred edges with some unusual pink features inside. Some things never look sharp no matter where you move the focus.
The extent of this effect is very lens dependent. It also occurs in different colours of visible light too, depending on how well the lens design accounts for it. Optically, the term is "Chromatic Aberration" - lens designers try and account for it in the visible spectrum with optical design and lens coatings, and modern designs are generally extremely well corrected in the visible spectrum. _Usually_ designers aren't worried about the design correctly handing convergence into IR and UV, so how well designs focus them to the same point as the visible spectrum is hit or miss. There's specialist lenses out there that are designed specifically for wide spectrum apochromatism, but they tend to be special purpose and very expensive - especially if they handle UV.
The author mentions it at the bottom of the post as something they're interested in trying out, but I've found it very fun to play with dual bandpass filters - they pass a part of the Visible Spectrum + IR, which creates some interesting options in editing for visual display. There's an example in this set I shot with different filters - https://www.reddit.com/r/infraredphotography/comments/1dnki0...
Related project: I shot a lot of landscapes in Iceland using a thermal (long wave IR) camera to show geologic phenomena in action. This involved stitching together a lot of (narrow FOV) thermal images and overlaying it on top of visible camera images for context.
https://petapixel.com/2019/07/13/shooting-high-res-thermal-p...
One thing I've wondered about is IR fluorescence photography.
I've seen some examples in document forensics where a page that looks blank (or at least the ink is unrecognizably smudged) because of water exposure is completely legible with an infrared photo illuminated by UV.
I suspect there must be a hidden world only visible in IR and UV (and long-wave IR, e.g. "thermal").
You’re considering whether it would be possible - and perhaps quite elegant - to use an XY‑scanner to raster‑scan the end of an optical fiber across a prism, disperse the light, and then capture the resulting spectrum with a CCD line sensor.
With that setup, each pixel on the line sensor would effectively record the full spectral content of the light at that scanned position, all in a single acquisition.
This is really cool -- pedantically, I've always thought "full spectrum" is actually misleading from a traditional photographic sense. Like IR + visible light + UV != full spectrum. I'd love to see post-processed imagery of every-day life through an extended view of broader EM energy (similar to astrophotography)... like what does a city scene look like with x-rays and microwaves included?
Side note: have always loved this image https://imgur.com/NZjWfWT of rainbows with UV and IR visible.