Blogipity

The Luminous Landscape has posted a review of the Epson R-D1 digial rangefinder camera, which accepts Leica L and M mount lenses. I’ve always been a fan of images taken with Leica rangefinders, and, after seeing some of the sample images in this review, all I can think is “I want, I want, I want!!”. Now if only I had $3000 for the camera and another $3000 for lenses, I’d be all set.

While I’ve been pining for a new Canon 20D, I’ve been reading up on cameras and photography in general a good bit. During one of my countless surfing sessions, I came across a few sites talking about Soviet rangefinder cameras. Most of these are Leica clones. The general consensus is that these cameras are great values.

Perhaps I’ll feed my gadget addiction with one of these cheap, old-school cameras.

I found a page containing an ingenious method for ascertaining a camera’s sensitivity to infrared. You simply point an infrared remote at it and look at the preview LCD to see how bright of a spot the remote makes.

This tip should help out those who are wondering how sensitive their cameras are to IR and don’t want to spend the bucks on an IR filter only to find out that their camera isn’t very good for IR photography.

J. Andrzej Wrotniak has written a nice summary of infrared filters in his Infrared photography with a digital camera. In addition to the filter summary, this piece is a great introduction to anyone wanting a quick primer to infrared photography.

I’ve been enjoying playing with my new Hoya R72 IR filter.
You can see from some of my first attempts at infrared photography that the results are somewhat inconsistent at the moment.

All of these shots were taken with a Canon A80 with very minimal post processing (Used Firework’s Auto Levels filter for some and adjusted the brightness/contrast for others). I initially used the A80’s shutter priority mode, but this mode always resulted in an ISO setting of 400, which created too much noise for my taste. I later used the full manual mode to set the ISO at 100, resulting in much less noise. The lower ISO setting, of course, required that I take longer exposures, but most of my shots didn’t require more than about 1.5 seconds. I still need to mess around a little more to consistently get my IR pictures in focus, which is a little difficult, since the LCD preview is rather dark with the filter. Setting a smaller aperture should also help in this regard (most of my shot were taken at F2.8), although this will require even longer exposures. I guess it’s time to start looking for a nice tripod.

I can’t wait for my new toy to arrive.

I ran across a few samples of infrared photography earlier this month, and I was hooked at first sight. Hopefully, I can produce some pics as good as some of the samples that I’ve seen.