Ir Photography On The Cheap

One boring, wet day, I was browing the web when I found an article on how to convert a point & click camera to an IR point & click camera.

It looked pretty simple. All you needed was an old camera and some exposed 35mm negative strips.

IR photos have always fascinated me, even in the good, old film days. I didn’t really want to spend £300 – £500 on a converted DSLR and the results I was getting using IR filters on my DSLR were a bit indifferent, so this cheap & easy DIY conversion sounded good to me.

I had an old Fuji Finepix Zoom (with a massive 1.2Mb pixel) in the Man Drawer that was the family holiday camera. It had been used & abused but still worked, sort of, it may have been a good idea to have taken the batteries out before I put it in the drawer!

Once the battery chamber was cleaned out & the contacts all nice & shiny again, I set about converting it.

To my surprise, it was as simple as the article said it was. I just had to remove a filter in front of the sensor and replace it with a couple of pieces of the exposed 35mm negative strip.

I was pleasantly surprised with the results that my new toy produced. My old point & click camera is now my new IR camera.

The images may not be of the highest quality and they are very grainy but considering the camera was just sitting there doing nothing, and it didn’t cost me anything, I’m happy!

More info: brianbatphotography.co.uk