My first attempt at solving this was to get some raw data for pure colors at 550/660/850nm and use that to transform the BMT sensor data into G/R/NIR, but I don’t really have the setup for collecting clean calibration data and my calibration matrixes all looked pretty bad.

My current attempt is to just define some arbitrary weights to map the BMT data to G/R/NIR and that’s been somewhat promising but progress is really slow.

Anyway this is my current rabbit hole 😬😬 #aerochrome #foveon

The most notable issue I’ve found so far is that red LEDs, which should appear bright green, show up as orange-yellow, probably because the bottom layer is still quite sensitive to red.

Since I’m just doing a naive mapping of the bottom layer to red, and the middle layer to green, this makes sense (yellow/orange is just green and red mixed together, which means red light triggers both the middle and bottom layers in equal-ish amounts) #aerochrome #foveon

Tried recreating #aerochrome on my full spectrum DP2 Merrill #foveon and I think I got pretty close!

Using a green/red/nir bandpass filter, along with a minus green cc30m filter to reduce greens a bit (all three foveon layers are green sensitive, so reduction is needed).

I shoot in raw and just dump each layer of sensor data to a color channel (top > blue, mid > green, bottom > red), and then adjust white balance and saturation in post. Surprisingly this kind of works!

Moonscape

#landscapephotography #naturephotography #photography #rniaero #Aerochrome #landschaftsfotografie #naturfotografie #fotografie

A Diamond In The Rough? How A Plan For A Full-Spectrum Conversion Went Astray

I’ve been doing a fair bit of film photography just lately. There’s a new Shitty Camera Challenge coming up in June, and my participation in the Frugal Film Project with the Rapid format Welta Penti II led me down a Rapid film system rabbit hole that I don’t think I’ll ever escape from. But there’s always a technique that’s near and dear to my heart, making digital aerochromes, and sometimes the desire to produce a digital aerochrome can be quite overpowering. 

If you’re not aware, ‘back in the day’ Kodak made a colour infrared film stock called Aerochrome. It would produce the most amazing looking infrared images where vegetation, which normally comes out white with black and white infrared films, would appear shades of a lovely rich red. Sadly, I never got to use Aerochrome, and Kodak withdrew the emulsion in around 2009. However, there is an alternative. 

Originally developed (no pun intended) for use with black and white infrared film, Joshua Bird devised a method that mimics the look of Aerochrome film. Using green, red, and infrared filters, Bird made an infrared ‘trichrome’ that really is a good reproduction of Kodak’s old film stock. Of course,  I’m not really in a position to use black and white film, and I’m impatient, so I came up with a solution that uses Joshua Bird’s technique with digital cameras. 

The slight snag is that the best digital cameras to use with this technique are older CCD sensor cameras, and not the CMOS sensor cameras of today. Fortunately, there are plenty of old point and shot cameras around, and here in Portugal an excellent source of cheap digicams is the Computer Exchange (CEX) website. In addition to specific models, they sometimes offer ‘generic’ digital cameras for just a few Euros, and whenever one appears on the website I am tempted to buy it. After all, the most I’ve paid is about 5€ and with postage I can get a working digicam for less than the price of a pint in the UK. What can go wrong?

Of course, you don’t actually know what you are going to get, as apart from the resolution of the camera in the description the rest of the website entry is also generic, even the image of the camera. That said, of the several ‘generic’ cameras that I have bought from CEX they’ve mostly been from reputable manufacturers, there’s never been a fake Canon or Nikon, and sometimes I’ve received a real gem, like the Samsung Digimax U-CA3 that cost the princely sum of 1€ and produces the most wonderful digital aerochromes. 

So I had this urge to pick up a cheap digital camera and convert it to full-spectrum so that I can make some digital aerochromes. This involves taking the camera apart and removing the infrared cut filter that is fitted over the sensor.  You can always use an uncovered camera, especially ftom the noughties when the cut filters weren’t as efficient as they are nowadays, but removing the filter is always better,  and besides it means that you can take infrared images hand-held.

Anyhow, last weekend a 7MP ‘generic’ digital camera appeared on the CEX website for 4€, and yesterday the doorbell rang. It was the postman with a small envelope from CTT (the Portuguese postal service). Bringing the pack inside, I was completely surprised with what I found: a Beautiful little Sony CyberShot W17 in its faux leather case. OK, it’s a little like a brick in its design, but I knew instantly that there was no way that I could bring myself to tear this one open to remove the cut filter.

First introduced by Sony in 2005, The Sony CyberShot W17 is a 7.2MP digital compact camera with a 7.9-23.7mm Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens. It has various automatic exposure modes, but can also be used manually, although I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. In the early noughties, camera manufacturers hadn’t standardised on the memory storage system,  and Sony was no exception. The W17 uses the Sony Memory Stick, a proprietary storage format that uses a long, thin plastic card. These are not that easy to get a hold of nowadays,  but fortunately, this camera included a 256MB Memory Stick Pro (a shorter version of the Memory Stick) and a Memory Stick adapter. I couldn’t actually believe my luck, as often as not these are all stripped out of the devices and sold separately. 

As well as a few normal shots in colour, I set the mode to black and white and took some images with colour and infrared filters to make a digital aerochrome. Back home, I downloaded the images from the memory stick onto my laptop and fired up GuIMP photo editor. Immediately I could see that the infrared response of the sensor was really good. My method for making digital aerochromes, from the article by Joshua Bird, used the digital images taken with infrared, red and green filters. The images were layered as red, green and blue layers, respectively. The blending mode for the red and green layers was set to addition and the results were spectacular! With beautiful pastel red vegetation and natural looking buildings and sky.

All in all, the Sony CyberShot W17 is a lovely little camera. The results are clean, if nothing special, but the infrared response was delightful. I’m definitely not going to modify this one for full-spectrum, though, so it looks like my search for a cheap noughties point and shoot camera just for conversion will have to wait a while.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Aerochrome #Camera #CyberShot #Digicam #Digitalcamera #Photography #Retro #Shittydigital #Sony #Urban #Vintage

It's spring and the leaves have come in on the trees, this means #Aerochrome time

Lens-Artists Challenge #335: Exploring Colour vs Black & White

This week, Patti of Creative Exploration in Words and Pictures is hosting the Challenge and she’s asking us to look at our use of colour or black & white in our photography. ‘When is it best to use one vs the other?’ She ponders: ‘What’s the benefit of each one?’

Patti sets us a challenge, ‘to explore the difference and the impact of using color [sic] or black & white photography in your selected photos. … Post pairs of the same image in both color and black & white. Limit the number of images to 3 pairs.’ She continues by asking us to: ‘Compare the differences in mood, texture, and light. Share your thoughts on how black & white or color processing impacts each photo. Tell us which one you prefer.’

I tend to use colour a lot in my photography, especially in film photography where I’m a big fan of those colour shifting emulsions like Lomochrome Turquoise or Purple. But in my digital work, I’m a little less … picky. 

Often it will depend on the subject. Most of my intentional camera movement (ICM) work is done in colour, I feel that ICM benefits from colour a lot, but the exception is urban ICM, which I think is much better in black and white. Similarly, if I’m out recording some street art then that always deserves colour — even if, or especially if, it’s starting to decay.

Sometimes, though, I set out to make images in black and white, then create colour images from them. There’s nothing I like more than taking an old digicam from the 2000s (the noughties) and testing out the infrared sensitivity of its lovely, lovely CCD sensor. This is often the first thing I do with every new digital camera I get my hands on, and the results can be … interesting. 

For example, here is a black and white infrared image of the steel footbridge over the Parque de Infante Dom Pedro in Aveiro. Taken with a Samsung Digimax U-CA3 digital camera from 2003, the camera has been set to monochrome mode and the image taken through a Hoya 720nm Infrared filter. It’s a typical looking infrared image, with white vegetation, which reflects the infrared wavelengths falling upon it, and dark skies and the metal of the bridge, which do not.

But when you take more monochrome images, using red and green filters, and edit the images as layers in a photo editor, everything changes. Suddenly the vegetation becomes shades of red, the sky becomes a bright blue or turquoise, and the image just pops. This is what I call a digital aerochrome, after the long defunct colour infrared emulsion made by Kodak and based on the procedure devised by Joshua Bird. He developed his method using infrared film, but the same technique applies to digital photography as well.

You can have a lot of fun with a digital camera and a set of filters. Take this infrared image of a landscape with lovely wispy clouds in the sky. It’s an OK infrared image in black and white, with the clouds popping against a dark sky. But make it into a digital aerochrome and suddenly the clouds become a kaleidoscope of colour. This is down to the clouds moving in the sky between the three exposures. When the images are lined up in the photo editor the colours of the filters don’t match and are presented in the image as individual colours.

Of course, it doesn’t always go as planned. Turns out this Konica Q-M100, a 1,3MP digital camera from 1997, can’t actually be set to monochrome mode, and the digital aerochromes were absolutely awful. That said, the regular colour images were quite stunning, but through an infrared filter, all of a sudden the image became almost monochrome in appearance. It looked as though a sepia filter had been applied, and personally I found this much more appealing than the colour image.

Sometimes we can combine two techniques. I thought that it might be a nice idea to try some infrared ICM. The results were less than stellar, though, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a more boring infrared image, or ICM image for that matter.

But when you make a digital aerochrome of the infrared woodland image, by taking further ICM images through red and green filters, all of a sudden the ICM becomes much more interesting. I’ve used this technique two or three times, and I really love how it comes out.

So instead of using these noughties digicams for ‘regular’ colour photography, odds are that during the sunny spring and summer months you’ll find me wandering around the woods behind our house or in Aveiro with a noughties digicam set to monochrome mode and my little collection of filters. So if you ask me, do I prefer to use colour or black and white, I can happy say, BOTH!

Next week, Ann-Christine will host the Challenge, so I hope that you can join us then. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Aerochrome #Blackandwhite #Challenge #Colour #Infrared #Landscape #LensArtists #Monochrome #Nature #Tree #Trichrome #TrichromeEverything #VintageDigital #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #328: Winter

For the penultimate Lens-Artists Challenge of 2024 it was John’s turn to host the Challenge and his theme for the week is, appropriately enough, ‘Winter‘. ‘This week’s challenge’, says John, ‘is to share your photos of what winter means to you. For me, Winter used to mean cold frosty mornings, snow on the trees (if we were lucky, but more likely rain) and, of course, scarves, gloves, and all we need to keep us warm. 

But all that was before we moved to Portugal. Now there’s no snow (well there is in the mountains but we don’t go there), no frosty mornings, and although we sometimes need a coat, it’s nothing like the cold we got in the UK. There is rain, though, plenty of that. Sometimes, though, the skies clear and we have lovely sunny, albeit chilly, days. Sometimes these days are suitable for just wearing T-shirts, but either I’m getting older or the weather is getting colder these are becoming less frequent. 

On the bright side it does enable me to get out and fake some snow-covered trees. How do I do that? Well here in Portugal, on a clear sunny day it’s ideal for infrared photography (and let’s face it, any sunny day is good for infrared photography, winter or summer). So the other day I headed out to Aveiro armed with the Canon Powershot A720, an 8MP digicam from 2007, and my trusty infrared filter. 

It wasn’t a wholly successful day. Although it was lovely and clear, the sun was low in the sky and the light was a little weak. Also, being winter a lot of the trees have lost their leaves.  As a result, most of the sights I like to visit were not as ‘wintery’ as I would have liked. Despite that, there were some lovely infrared views in Aveiro where the ground was covered in ‘snow’.

Naturally, in addition to the regular monochrome infrared photographs I had to make some digital aerochromes. In this instance the normal white of the vegetation is rendered as shades of red. Whuke not reminiscent of winter in any was, it just had to be done.

Next week, it’s the Lens-Artists year-end challenge. Where we review our images over the past year and present some that don’t quite fit the various Challenge subjects of the year. The rules of this week are that the chosen photographs were taken in 2024 and have not been used in any of the year’s Challenges.

Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Aerochrome #Challenge #Infrared #LensArtists #Snow #TrichromeEverything #Winter #LensArtists