This week I did a project that I’ve been wanting to do since I was a kid. I converted a digital camera to infrared. The photos I got might look a little different than you would expect if you were thinking of an infrared thermal camera. Cameras like those work on much longer wavelengths, and are meant to pick up emitted infrared light. The infrared camera that I made works on near infrared light, which is the closest to the visible spectrum at around 700-800 NM. The images produced are somewhat ghostly. The foliage seems to glow and some objects seem to become transparent.

The process of converting the camera was somewhat nerve-wracking. My friend Patty donated his Canon EOS 350D for the project, and together we tore it down to bits. The main goal was to take out and replace the existing cut filter that covers the sensor and filters out both infrared and UV light, leaving only the narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes can see. The new filter cuts out all of the visible spectrum, and passes only infrared light.

I have always loved the idea of seeing past the visible spectrum. When I was a kid I listened to a podcast where they talked about how butterflies can see a far past the visible spectrum, all the way from infrared to the ultraviolet range and beyond. They even said that some researchers had successfully injected butterfly DNA into they eyes of monkeys, allowing them to see a greater range of colors. That thought fascinated me for years. What would the new colors even look like? Would your brain process it as a different shade of a familiar color, or would your mind be opened up to something new entirely? The idea of a new world of color was so fascinating that I even looked into recreating the experiment on myself. With no idea of what I would find, I was willing to drive a needle deep into my retina just for the possibility to discover something magical.

Obviously, I was never able to recreate the experiment. Today, with a slightly better understanding of genetic engineering, virus vectors and RNA plasmids, I can safely say that the only thing that 13 year old me would have achieved was blindness, and possibly a nasty infection. Still, looking at the pictures that I was able to attain by looking at just a small segment of the larger spectrum, I do feel like I unlocked something a little magic.