Life in Another Light, 2024 Infrared-Photography-Contest Winners | Hacker News Reader

Life in Another Light, 2024 Infrared-Photography-Contest Winners

theatlantic.com

58 pointszdw17 comments

These are gorgeous. Can't go past this without a heads-up for Greg Egan's 2014 short story Seventh Sight, where the protagonists hack their (at the time bleeding-edge tech) eye implants, allowing them to be part of a vanishingly-small group of people that can see into the infrared and ultraviolet.

I think it was in a Daedalus article that I read a passing reference to a technician who had had an operation for cataracts - the synthetic lens then allowed them to see a little way into the ultraviolet and thus they were able to calibrate a spectrometer "by eye" !

Edit: Ok, I looked it up... from the Daedalus column in New Scientist in May 1969:

"... Daedalus recalls the story of a professor of spectroscopy who lost an eye-lens in an explosion. He was given corrective spectacles with enough UV transparency to let him see some way into this region of the spectrum. Accordingly, he could line up the departmental UV spectrometers by eye, and was much in demand!"

During WWII the british special forces recruited men with glass lenses from cataract surgery who could see ultraviolet strobe lights. They helped smuggle things in and out of Norway by boat. There was a book published on naked eye astronomy in the ultraviolet.

Makes me think of Star Trek's Geordie LaForge, a blind engineer whose VISOR[0] not only gave him vision back, it extended it into IR, UV ranges and beyond[1].

(Curiously, for a show from 1990s, the visualization of what he sees[2] is eerily similar to images produced by misconfigured diffusion models.)

[0] - Then futuristic; these days, I'm rather confident you could hack it up with VR glasses and enough sensors, leaving only the direct brain interface in the realm of sci-fi. Alas, the necessary suite of real sensors is still stupidly expensive AFAIK, way beyond a budget of a hobby project or even a product prototype.

[1] - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/VISOR#Capabilities

[2] - There's some screencaps in the MemoryAlpha article I linked; can't link directly, because the site detects hotlinking.

Original article https://kolarivision.com/life-in-another-light-infrared-phot...

I remember removing the IR filter from a cheap webcam and seeing everything in a new light (haha, pun intended) was fascinating. One of my black coats that didn't get hot under the sun and appeared more reflective and. I remember some opaque things like Coke being much more translucent.

These winning photos are a bit boring my comparison, the ghostly effect of foliage in IR is cool but a bit overdone when there's so many and there were so many other interesting differences in every day objects.

I'd love to do the same with my mirrorless camera but it's a quite destructive operation.

> I remember some opaque things like Coke being much more translucent.

Many years ago (around 1998 or so) there was a Sony Camcorder which lacked or had the ability to have its IR filter removed. That supposedly gave it the ability to "see through" clothing which caused quite the uproar.

I bought one of those Flir One Pro IR cameras and bought it to a friends party. One thing that we were surprised about was that it could see clear through latex balloons.

I had one those Sony camcorders, it’s night shot was insane. It could see through skin as well revealing vein structure in a lot of detail.

> One thing that we were surprised about was that it could see clear through latex balloons.

This was something which surprised me too. Not specifically latex, but how many manufactured materials appear to be transparent in IR.

The explanation I heard is that it is because dye manufacturers usually want to make their product keep their colour long even when exposed to direct sunlight. And the easiest way to achieve that is by selecting materials which are transparent in IR. If they weren't the absorbed IR energy would break them down faster.

So people usually don't care about the IR opaqueness of their pigments/dyes but they care about colour fastness. And that is what selects for IR transparency.

I was once involved in a project which projected Aruco markers in IR. So you get a slide projector, swap the bulb for an LED, have some slides made at the photo place, and you're done, right?

No - slide projector slides are IR transparent on purpose, so that they don't absorb heat from the bulb.

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2025/01/infrared-photograp...

This one is something. What is making the rocks luminous, fungus?

The nature scenes are spectacular.

I would hazard a guess the photographer got creative with a UV flashlight given the eerie blue glow on the stone that is not florescent

https://www.minershop.com/pages/uvandourhobby

> What is making the rocks luminous, fungus?

It is the rocks themselves. Infrared luminescence is the name of the effect. It is a bit like fluorescence except that the emission occurs in the infrared rather than the visible part of the spectrum.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/1052c/report.pdf

omg these are so beautiful. I am a photography enthusiast and I didn't knew there was something called infrared photography. I don't quite get the name, how is done?

With the use of a sensor or film sensitive to infrared light, and optionally the use of deep red/orange lens filter to block out all the other wavelengths.

Rollei still manufacturers infrared 35mm film, I think it used to be used for aerial surveying, because green foliage is also reflecting lots of infrared

For digital cameras a lot of sensors are already sensitive but it's undesirable because it shows up as false colors, red hot things will appear pink or purple, so digital cameras have internal infrared filters. Go on eBay and search infrared converted camera, lots to choose from, iirc it's a pretty simple surgery if you're the type to take things apart and put them back together

Here's a nice guide for more https://phlogger.co.uk/how-to-shoot-colour-infrared-film-by-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_photography

I did this with a manual 35mm camera. You can purchase rolls of infrared sensitive film. You must make a focus adjustment when shooting infra red. Most manual camera focus rings have a second focus index mark, since infrared light focus converges slightly differently than natural light. See:

https://www.35mmc.com/30/03/2023/focus-adjustment-and-other-...

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