This is an industrial plant taken at dusk in infrared.

I think they should look like this all the time.

While we weren’t looking, someone went and embossed Colorado.

It’s interesting that, due to the tree growth, the healthiest parts of farmed land look like scars.

Sometimes the infrared-in-colour effect does things I can’t really explain.

The camels seem confused as well.

Here’s another view of just the bright spot effect hovering over the clouds, so you can see it without all the other distractions.

There are times when I’m flying and the clouds are just right to focus the suns light into a bright spot that follows the plane for several minutes. It is clearly some sort of reflection or refraction of the sun. What I like here is that you can see the sun, the sun’s reflection off the wing, the weird cloud effect *and* some lens flare so you can tell that the weird sun thing isn’t just in the lens. I could see it with the unaided eye … and now you can too.

Even though the new camera can see “colour” in infrared, I still prefer the high-contrast black and white look. As a bonus, it can make innocuous things, like this new coloured pencil fence, look kinda old and creepy.

Two odd things about infrared cameras:

1) Even thought blue is well outside of the IR range, some things that are blue to the human eye get picked up as blue by the converted camera. I did some testing and I’m pretty sure that this is how this particular camera sees deep infrared. I have no idea why visible blue also reflects as deep IR, but it does.

2) Some lenses have hotspots, where the infrared light hits the sensor and bounces off to hit the rear of one of the elements of the lens (somewhere in front of the aperture) and bounces back to get detected again. In the final image, this shows up as a ghostly light, usually in the center of the frame. This effect usually just shows strongly up at certain aperture settings.

In this case, both effects worked to my advantage.

After playing with one camera that had an infrared range that went into the visible (orange -> deep IR) and one that only did deep infrared, I thought I should convert one to a wider range of infrared, but one that was entirely invisible to the human eye.

This is what the Minnehaha Falls look like when you can’t look at them.