Tag: Shandon

Nice sunny morning yesterday and cloud was forecast for later in the day so I went out early with the infrared converted D70. This camera has a opaque filter installed over the sensor instead of the normal AA filter, so it only uses the part of the sensor that’s sensitive to the infrared end of the spectrum.

Green foliage tends to reflect more IR, blue skies block out a lot so they go extra dark. And the D70 sensor colour sites tend to get a bit confused. Most notably, the jpegs do this browny-black / blue / white feel but the RAW images have a distinctly red hue (of the same capture). Normally I’d do a black and white conversion to normalise all that but the colours are often interesting.

Everything looks kinda spooky. Love the really dark skies.

But although the IR-effect can make everything look more interesting, the image still needs to be interesting to make it work. It’s tempting to take some very simple compositions just to enjoy the IR-effect but really you still need to work the composition.

It’s just that certain elements are different. For example. you can’t let the white grass take over, whereas you’d often leave a good bit of green grass in a shot to balance things out.

Also using the ancient D70 is fun. You’ll constantly read about how new models make older cameras into trash but that’s nonsense. The D70 was a great camera in it’s day. Sure it’s lower res, lower DR, has a tiny screen, is slow and less effective autofocus. But it is by no means unusable and actually works really well for scenic images. It has a very satifying ‘clunk’ to the shutter and there’s something nice about having small files to work with for non-critical work.