Digital Infrared Photography With The Fuji S20 Pro; There’s More To Life Than Color Image Files!
Joe Farace, November, 2004
Photos © 2004, Joe Farace,
All Rights Reserved
“Why not?”—Dayton
Allen
Whenever I get a new digital camera
from Fuji I run down to the family room and give it the “remote control
test.” What’s that? One of the easiest ways to check if your digicam
is infrared capable is to point a TV remote control at the lens and take a picture
or look at the image on the LCD panel. If you see a point of light, you’re
ready to make IR digital images.
The imaging chips in most digital cameras are fitted with an internal infrared
cutoff filter that is designed to reduce IR contamination. Many, but not all,
consumer digicams let enough IR through to allow for what techies call near
infrared photography. With digital IR imaging, if your digicam passes the TV
remote test and, like the Fuji FinePix S20 Pro, has a black and white mode,
you’ll see the infrared effect right before your eyes.
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This
pseudo panoramic IR image was created from an original Fuji file
that was both cropped and “stretched.” I stretched
it by first increasing the horizontal dimension of the Canvas
(Image>Canvas Size) then selecting the image and dragging it
sideways using the Free Transform tool (Edit>Free Transform)
until it gave the overall photo a “widescreen” look
without too much distortion. The original image file was captured
at ISO 200 in gray scale mode at f/2.8 and 1/3 sec with the Fuji
FinePix S20 Pro mounted on a Joe Farace Signature Edition Tiltall
tripod.
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Why IR?
The simplest reason for shooting digital infrared is that the technique has
the power to transform the mundane into the unforgettable. Everyday scenes that
you might walk by and never think of photographing take on a more dramatic look
when seen as infrared.
Back in the bad old days of IR film, you needed to use special film and load
and unload it in total darkness. To work with IR film you needed special, read
expensive—that part hasn’t changed—filters and then either
process the film yourself or find an ever-dwindling pool of specialty labs to
do it for you. When shooting IR film it’s more click and hope, but with
Fuji’s FinePix S20 Pro, black and white IR images can be made in camera—and
you’ll see the results in its electronic viewfinder before you snap the
shutter.
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With
6-megapixel resolution from Fuji’s exclusive Super CCD chip,
image quality from the FinePix S20 Pro can be stunning. This JPEG
image file was captured with the Cokin 007 filter at ISO 400.
Exposure was 1/7 sec and f/2.8 at 9mm (digital) with camera supported
by Tiltall tripod.
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You can pull images directly off
an xD-Picture Card or CompactFlash Type II, which Fuji specifies as “Microdrive,”
that fit the camera’s dual slots. Fuji provides a 16MB xD-Picture Card
with the camera and kindly lent me a 64MB card, and I was able to borrow one
of Hitachi’s 2GB Microdrives (www.pexagontech.com)
so I could take lots of pictures. Why not a 4GB Microdrive? Because it’s
FAT 32 and the S20 Pro is FAT 16 compatible. (See Sidebar: Get FAT, Like Atkins,
page 2.)
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