Today’s Post by Joe Farace
My favorite Aspen memory is saving an upside-down cake that had exploded from the high altitude.—Emeril Lagasse
The nine-megapixel Fujifilm IS-1 super zoom camera was introduced in 2007 and was designed to photograph subjects in both normal visible light and in the near infrared range. This design made it well suited for forensic or scientific applications as well as the kind of creative infra-red photography that I like to do.
How I Made this Photo: The featured photograph was made in Aspen, Colorado when I accompanied my wife who was calling on clients there. The JPEG exposure was 1/420 sec at f/6.4 and ISO 400. I imported the JPEG file into Silver Efex and used its Full Dynamic (harsh) preset and tweaking Contrast, Brightness and Structure sliders. Next I applied the Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex Pro get the image you see here.
The Camera
This unique camera used Fujifilm’s Super CCD HR sensor and used a Real Photo Processor that was capable delivering up to IS0 1600, which is not much these days but was a big deal back in 2007.
The IS-1’s built-in 28-300mm (equivalent) f/2.8-4.0 lens incorporated aspherical elements to minimize distortion and aberrations. Fuji claimed the IS-1’s “Image quality has been enhanced through improvements to its processing algorithms” and to tell the truth the camera produced pretty good image quality even by today’s standard.
What was really interesting to me about the Fujifilm IS-1 to me was that it could shoot in Infra-Red or Normal modes. The camera was sensitive to a broad range of light frequencies (400-900nm) covering the full range of visible light as well as the near infra-red range. Specific wavelengths can be isolated and captured from daylight or artificial light sources via the use of lens filters.
On a personal note, the Fujifilm IS-1 was the very last Fuji digital camera that I ever tested, either for Shutterbug‘s print edition or this blog, which was well before they became the cult hit of mirrorless cameras and the darling of affordable medium format digital cameras. If you look hard enough, you can find used Fujifilm IS-1’s on sale here and there. I found some on Amazon for around $300.
I’ve found that Life Pixel does a great job with IR conversions and they’ve done most of the conversions for my Canon DSLRs and all of my Panasonic Lumix G-series cameras. This is not a paid or sponsored endorsement, just my experience.
Used copies of my book, The Complete Guide to Digital Infrared Photography are currently available new from Amazon for $33.66 or used copies for less than four bucks, as I write this. Creative Digital Monochrome Effects has a chapter on IR photography and new copies are available from Amazon for $16.16 with used copies starting at less than three bucks, which is a heckuva deal.