Digital Infrared Photography Equipment – how to get started!

Step 2: Digital Infrared Photography Equipment – A Few Critical Supplies

Have you checked to make sure your digital camera is able to take infrared photos? Excellent, Smithers!

But before you can begin to click away, you’ll need some additional digital infrared photography equipment. Depending on your camera, you may need a few extras too.

The main accessories for digital infrared photography are a Tripod with Panhead, and an INFRARED FILTER, that will block visible light but let the invisible infrared light pass through to the camera’s sensor.

The tripod is almost always a requirement to stabilize your camera, because the filter is so dense that your exposure will be very long – and camera shake will knock your images out of focus. When you look through an infrared filter, it is just about black, and you can barely see anything except the brightest objects (like the sun!) through it.

digital infrared filters

If you have a point & shoot digital camera, you will probably need an ADAPTER TUBE and a step up ring to allow the filter to fit onto your camera.

Your set-up would look something like this:

Digital infrared camera equipment

The adapter tubes and rings aren’t too expensive. For my Olympus the tube was about $35.00 and the ring was about $15.00.

The filters are more expensive, ranging from $50.00 to a high of $135.00. If you shop on the Internet, you can find some good deals,

You may have to adjust and fine tune, a bit but bracketing, white balance and angle of the sun are all considerations regardless of your equipment.

DIGITAL INFRARED PHOTOGRAPHY EQUIPMENT FOR DLSR CAMERAS

For DSLR shooters, the requirements are the same with the exception of the adapter and step up rings. Screw on filters will work with your DLSR lenses, so there is no need for adapters.

You may want to consider Cokin filters which allow you to use one filter for all your lenses regardless of the thread size of the lens. You buy one filter and filter holder, and various adapter rings for each lens size. The adapter rings are really cheap compared to the cost of buying several different diameter filters.

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