Always chasing the beautiful colors of the elusive Aerochrome film I dived into the art of infrared photography. It is one of the many niche areas of photography, infrared photography can produce images that are almost otherworldly. This is because infrared light is invisible to the human eye, making the resulting images alien to our perception. Most of the time when taking photographs we are trying to accurately and artistically capture what our eyes see but with infrared photography, we are aiming to capture the invisible, the imperceptible, a new way of seeing our world.
Other animals that inhabit the world are sensitive to other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum such as infrared, ultraviolet, and magnetic fields. These give the animals an evolutionary advantage, for example, bees use UV to more easily locate the center of flowers and flowers vice versa for pollination, and other bugs use infrared to detect a mate. It’s much more common than you would think!
Aerochrome film is just one way to take an infrared image, there are a few other infrared-sensitive films but they are almost exclusively black and white. Even with the film resurgence niche films have not come back, either because the market would not support the product or the chemical process and manufacturing knowledge has been lost to time. So what are our options for taking infrared photos nowadays?
Fortunately, all modern digital camera sensors are capable of sensing infrared light! But this “feature” is usually undesirable in taking normal images, so camera manufacturers go to great lengths to cut the IR light from reaching the sensor. This is done with optical filters (glass) that filter out the IR light only letting visible light through. If this was not done the resulting image would have a heavy red layer obscuring most of the color information.
Camera Surgery
So we need to do some camera surgery to remove the IR cut filter that is responsible for the bulk of this reduction. This process will be heavily dependent on what camera you have but I will be making this full spectrum modification on a Panasonic Lumix GF3. This is a micro 4/3 camera with a 12-megapixel sensor. This should be more than enough resolution to create some beautiful prints of the resulting IR images. I also selected this camera because of the ease of the modification, no glue, just screws and cables to remove and put back.
I made a small video of the disassembly and reassembly process which you can view below.
This was unfortunately the easiest step in the whole build, and now we are about to get technical about why that is!
The Hard Part
Camera design is a fascinating feat of manufacturing precision, from the exact curves of the glass lenses to the perfect positioning and alignment, everything needs to be spot on and accounted for to make an image come into existence. Without these things, you will be left with at best a blurry mess of the desired scene. So when you start opening things up, removing components, and reassembling some things are bound to be off! The video shows my very first attempt at making my camera take what is essentially full spectrum but there were more than a few things I needed to do to get the look and functionality I required.
The first problem to solve was that my camera was more sensitive to IR but was still removing some of the light making it impossible to get the Aerochrome look with additional filters (more on that in a bit) the problem was that I left in the dust cover for the sensor.
This part of the camera protects the sensor from dust particles and makes it easy to remove them with an electrified pulse that vibrates or electrostatically repulses them. This was glued down and was the only part of the camera I broke while removing it since the glass is so thin. After that all good right? Not quite…
I was getting images but they were blurry and the autofocus could not achieve lock, or focus to infinity. This was an issue going back to the precision of such a device, the sensor was now too far from the camera flange. This is caused by two problems, first, when I removed the sensor module to remove the filters I had not noted the exact positioning of the sensor’s spring mount So I had not accurately positioned the sensor. After I tightened the whole camera down the picture looked mostly focused but the autofocus would still hunt and not lock on even at f22!
This is a more subtle issue, the filters that I had removed were made of glass, not air, and in removing them I had changed the optical distance that the light traveled within the camera making it almost impossible to focus without trimming the metal sensor mount in the hopes I could get it close enough, but there was an easier solution get a clear piece of glass to replace the removed one.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803862711669.html
Thankfully I found a seller on AliExpress that had an almost exact piece of such glass, it was bigger by about a 10th of an mm and did not have the notch the filtered glass did but I was able to fit it in with a bout of force and sanding! Now it’s a fully functional full-spectrum camera! For the most part, it is still a bit soft in focus but that could be due to factors such as the quality of the glass and my unapproved sensor cleaning practices. But good enough for me to start taking infrared images.
Filters
As I alluded to earlier, the camera does not take pictures that look like Aerochome yet! we need to filter the IR light to reproduce the false color. For this, there are several companies that produce a filter that recreates the look, Vision Architect Optics and Kolari. I got both the VAO and Kolari filters to test.
Comparing the VAO and Kolari they are about on par with each other but you will save 30% by going with the VAO here is 2 side-by-side images below. The first set is straight from the camera with custom white balance profiles for each.
This second set has been edited in Affinity Photo with a custom LUT (Look UP Table) that I designed to give more Aerochrome-like colors for this camera.
If you want just the IR light you can purchase 590nm Filters that block almost everything but the IR light which gives the image a black-and-white look but with the sky black and trees and foliage white.
If you want to turn the camera back for taking non-IR images you could take the whole thing apart again (not advised) or just add a cheap IR cut filter to the front of the lens. it’s that easy!
Upcoming Projects
I didn’t just make this camera for fun, I made this camera for a specific purpose. A project to take infrared Aerochrome images on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Here is a sneak preview of the results!
References
These resources were invaluable for converting my own camera check them out if you are also interested in converting a Lumix GF3.
Shoot Aerochrome on iPhone
If you liked this post and want to try shooting some Aerochrome-like film on your iPhone consider purchasing my 36Exp film camera app now available on the iOS App Store!
