Thursday 19 March 2015

CELESTIALS

Taking handheld shots of celestial objects usually takes a tripod and a camera hooked up to a telescope. But the Lumix Fz200 allows you to zoom all the way WITHOUT losing it's speedy advantage. That is it can maintain f2.8 all the way.

How does it work? Don't know, don't care.

Add the telephoto extender (DMW-LT55) and you can take shots of the mountains of the moon standing on a street corner. Or if it's a nice day and you have an ND10000 filter (actually quite cheap), you can take pics of sunspots!







Even if you can only take grainy shots, as you would get with any camera that's NOT the Fz-200 you can take multiple handheld shots of the same thing and stack them. Here I took 8-10 grainy photos and used PhotoAcute to enhance the detail. You can also use Photoshop's "Load Files into Stack" command.




Some other random celestial events, taken with the Fz-150 unfortunately.




Wednesday 18 March 2015

650 - 900nm Is Where I Want To Live

My favourite photon wavelength.

Taken with the full spectrum Lumix and filtered for extended infrared. More info on that in the equipment page.















Sunday 15 March 2015

Hanging out down in UV (330nm - 400nm)

The UV range is a strange place to be. And one of the hardest to capture.
On my modified full spectrum Lumix I needed to have a number of filters.
First a 'hot mirror' that block all IR rays. Also, a very specific piece of black glass that
blocks visible light only. This glass also lets IR through so that's why I need the hot mirror too.
I couldn't find the glass in lens for so I ordered it from a scientific company.
I got a 2 inch square piece of glass that I hold over the lens when taking the pic.
http://www.hoyaoptics.com/color_filter/uv_transmitting.htm

You also need a very powerful UV source and in these pics the sun volunteered.

Even with both of those filters I was getting lots of colour information too so,
in Lightroom I had to alter the temperature until I go the classic UV face effect.

UV faces are not pretty. Nearly every freckle, scar or other damage to your skin
from the last few years will show. Most people look like they've been working down
a coal-mine and age seems to be amplified.

I wasn't sure if I was actually capturing UV only or something else at first but
I was able to confirm it using patches of sun block which showed up on my
my experiment but were not visible to the eye.



I really don't have any visible freckles. 





My girl : white as white can be.

My friend Ian-John had a beard for 2 years. He had shaved it off weeks before this pic but you can still see its legacy here.


Models come off the best. But I'll give her a few more years and try again :)

Because of the set up and post processing needed I found it impossible to do UV video which is a pity. It is something rarely seen. But here it's beautifully done by Thomas Leveritt, this video went viral for a while so you may have already seen it. Also, his set up is a lot less shoddy than mine!




Wednesday 11 March 2015

SKIN DEEP

One of my favourite aspects of infrared is that it goes deep beneath certain surfaces. With a really strong source, i.e the sun, some rays can go a centimetre into the skin before being reflected. The result is truly eerie.








Mosquito vision :)



Something I also noticed is that the effect is really strong on caucasian skin but almost non
existent with Asian skin under the same conditions.