Infrared

One day I came across the old point and shoot digital camera that my parent's had generously brought me to play with as a kid (I was always mad for photography seemingly). I was wondering what I could do with it when I remembered reading about people preforming full spectrum conversions on their old cameras.

Essentially digital sensors (allegedly CCD sensors like in this camera are even better than the more modern CMOS sensors) aren't just good at detecting visible light, and depending on the sensor are completely apt at picking up infrared and even some ultraviolet. Obviously camera manufacturers don't really want their customers family photos coming out odd shades of pink because of infrared prolusion so they instal all digital cameras with sensor filter stacks. These usually contain antialiasing filters to stop moiré, as well as optical low pass filters to cut out unwanted wave lengths of light. At some point some bright person figure out you could simply cut these filters out form in front of the sensor and enjoy the full gamut of the sensor, hence the phrase full spectrum.

This was a popular modification for rather enthusiastic Astro photographers to let more light into their cameras and to pick up on things normal camera and our eyes don't see. But some rather insane people also use it for landscape work as it has quite interesting effects on foliage as you will see bellow:

It turns out the chloroplast found in plants tends to let off a decent amount of infrared energy during photosynthesis. I don't know what any of that actually means but it sure does look cool!