Marieke / Focal Camera

Infra-Red Camera

For the focal camera project I wanted to build an analogue infra-red camera. I actually didn't really have a clue about analogue photography and how these cameras work because I previously worked solely with digital cameras. But I'm happy to say that I kind of get it now.

So the first step was to decide what kind of camera I would go for. I picked the pinhole because I wanted to understand the most basic camera as my starting point. To the pinhole camera I also added a viewfinder that combined two lenses. The building of this was to my surprise very doable and not that complicated. But since I am researching infra-red photography for my self-directed research, I had the question: Is it possible to build this camera in a way that it will capture the infra-red light?

So since the camera is analogue there was not necessarily a special way to do this in the building phase of the camera.

That's why I needed the Ilford SFX film roll so I used this. This film is capable of partially capturing the infra-red light. Full infra-red film rolls are unfortunately no longer available or I would have to buy them second-hand for a super expensive price.

So to summarize I just made a basic pinhole camera in which I used the Ilford SFX film.

What were the results?

Well the film roll was overexposed. This had multiple reasons: When using an infra-red film roll you need to be kind of precise about the exposure time as it is very easy to over or underexpose. The exposure time will be longer but it is hard to guess how long with no experience beforehand. I also used a red piece of plastic in front of the pinhole so it would be able to capture the Infra-Red light, because when you would use a regular analogue camera with a lens you also need an infra-red filter. (because the film rolls are only partially infra-red) Of course a piece of red plastic is not the same as an infra-red filter. During the developing I also wasn't careful enough with outtake of the film so it probably got exposed during this too, while these infra-red films are super sensitive to exposure so I should have been more precise.

I'm also not sure if a pinhole and infra-red film is a nice combination. Since the shutter speed is so hard to control and it still needs an infra-red filter on the lens.

I will further this experiment on my own Olympus analogue camera with 35 mm infra-red film rolls in combination with my Hoya R72 lens filter.

If i will use my pinhole camera again I will do this with black and white film rolls in medium format.

Because I wanted to see if there was a slight hint of an image on my film I scanned the film roll. These results are also added to this page.

In the end I don't mind that I didn't get pictures yet, because by sort of failing I found out a lot more about infra-red photogpraphy. And I finally get the mechanics of a camera a lot better.