Best anniversary gift ever! (2011 edition)

This year, The Wife and I will celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary (I imagine a lot of folks lost money on that bet). Because we'll be halfway across the country on a Griswold Family Adventure, we've been treating each other to gifts ahead of time this year. Take a gander there to the right. See that? Best anniversary present, ever. Now I know what you're thinking: "Hold on there, Jayme. That there is your Canon Rebel XTi, the very same camera you bought back in early 2008 with money you got from selling off your Doctor Demento radio show collection. And that lens is the Canon EF 50mm 1.8 mark I that you bought used in 2009. How can that possibly be your anniversary gift, much less a good one?" Well friends, that is indeed a valid question. It is true that neither camera nor lens is new, and that I've taken many photos with them over the years. But as your parents assured you during those awkward junior high years, "It's what's on the inside that counts."

Since The Wife has both a Canon 5D mark II and a Canon 50D camera for her photography business, mine is no longer needed for backup duty. Likewise, she recently picked up an older Canon 300D Digital Rebel (aka the "Junk Camera"), which serves as a quick grab-and-go camera for snapshots and the like. My XTi, capable as it was, had become redundant. The only thing I still used it for was infrared photography. I've been fascinated by IR since almost the moment I got that camera. I bought several 720nm filters to thread over the ends of lenses, and have shot many, many false-color landscape images over the years. The trouble with this arrangement is that exposure times are very long--20 seconds is not uncommon--which means I always need a tripod for shots. Not only that, but because the filters are essentially black, I have to compose and focus the shot first, then thread the filter on, then shoot, which makes the entire process complicated, cumbersome and slow. I've tried shooting portraits in IR, and it just didn't work. The alternative to this is getting a camera converted. Converting a camera to full-time infrared involves removing the IR-blocking filter from the image sensor (the so-called Hot Mirror) and replacing it with a filter that blocks visible light while allowing IR to pass unhindered. Finally, the focusing is recalibrated using a 50mm lens, as the longer IR wavelengths focus at a slightly different point than visible light. Once all that is done, what you have is a camera that you can use just like any other, only it takes images in a part of the spectrum invisible to the human eye. Is that cool, or what?

I'm happy to report that The Wife, wholly on her own and uninfluenced by me (apart from a steady stream of links, hints, suggestions and outright pleading) craftily bundled up my XTi and shipped it off to LifePixel for 720nm IR conversion. The camera returned last week. This makes me exceedingly happy. I've been far too busy at work and home to give it a proper workout, but during my lunch break today I went outside and, using a tripod (ironic, I know) took a few test self-portraits, once of which is below:

This is, simply put, an amazing photo. Not because of the subject, wise guy, but because of the technical settings: f/8.0, ISO 400, shutter speed 1/30. bear in mind that it is heavily overcast out today, with occasional feeble drizzle. Pre-converted and using a thread-in filter, the shutter speed would've been in the 40 second range, my face would've had blurring because of my inability to hold stock-still for that long, and the image overall would be muddy with poor contrast because of the cloud cover. This image is crisp. It's the sharpest IR portrait I've ever taken of any human being, and this is with my guesstimating the focal plane. And this image is pretty much straight out of the camera--I tweaked the levels a bit and applied an unsharp mask to it, but I'd have worked half an hour to get my earlier IR efforts to this point. I also discovered that while my 50mm lens produces clean, white images, my 28-135 lens adds a yellowish color cast to them. This is odd, and I've never heard of a lens doing this before. I'll have to investigate further, under better lighting conditions.

But yeah, as I said before: Best anniversary gift ever!

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