Just before the weekend, I had an unfortunate experience with a microscope that was lacking an IR-filter. This was unfortunate because I had labeled some proteins with an IR-emitting antibody, which was for all intents and purposes rendered 100% invisible.
This made me think – could I make my camera take in all wavelengths of light, even though I can’t see it myself?
Unsurprisinly, someone had thought of this before me. In “How to build your own IR camera”, Pieter Albertyn explains how he removed the IR-filter from a cheap digital camera and replaced it with a handcut glass slide.
I threw on some pants and went to town, pestering my local electronics store for:
- Tweezers
- Some really small screwdrivers
- Some glass (I wanted some cover glass, but had to settle for photo frame glass, which is much thicker)
- A glass cutter
I picked out my old Panasonic Lumix DMC-T27 and prepared to wreck it. Amazingly, I found this gentleman to guide me through the process:
Test #1: Panasonic Lumix
Ideal to test since I had one handy and found a guide for picking it apart and had “borrowed” this camera from my father some years ago…
My father believes I ruin any electronic components I touch, so I braced myself.
Unscrew the camera and open the back cover. Notice that the LED-screen is attached with two cables:
If you like, you can detach these. They’re sturdier than they look. However, after picking the camera apart a couple of times, I noticed that you don’t really need to detach the cables to access the filter.
The thing between my fingers is the digital camera’s eyes (the CCD)! You can see I’ve detached the IR-filter that covered the CCD and placed it on the table. It’s a little blue piece of glass in a protective black gummy. Remove the IR-filter and put the gummy back in the camera. If you don’t put the protective gummy back, your camera will have trouble focusing. So put it back and reattach both cables.
A note regarding the guides I posted above: If you want to, you can replace the IR-filter with a new «filter» made of glass. As you can see, I managed to cut a piece of glass. However, it was much thicker than the IR-filter. It ended up dropping it, and found that the camera worked just as well without it. In fact, with this “filter” inserted, the camera could not focus.
Time to turn the Lumix on. What do we see?
In normal light, there is now a purple shine to everything. That would be the near-IR and IR light picked up by the camera!
Now for the exciting part: putting the IR-camera to the test.
Using a remote control with an IR light, this is the photo IR-Lumix captured when I activated the remote control aiming at my face:
Disappointing! Or is it? Let’s have a look in Photoshop.
What about a dark glass of Pepsi Max?
Now this image is unedited. This is the way colours appear in a camera that lets in IR-light.
A very interesting detail: notice the lamp clearly visible through the black drink!
You might say that this is not a true IR-camera. Indeed, the Lumix now detects IR light along with visible wavelengths. However, you can easily turn this camera into an IR-only camera by fitting a high-pass IR lens that will only pass IR-light to the CCD.
(The reason this is not covered in the manual is that my local camera salesman seemed to suffer a nervous breakdown when I explained my project to him.)
All in all – test successful!
lizardphunk 