What is wrong with this camera?

February 9, 2020 11:31 AM

I grabbed a cheap Olympus E-P3 off ebay in order to play with some inherited 80s SLR lenses and it takes very strange pictures. After some digging I've discovered that they look suspiciously similar to these photos taken by cameras that have been modified for infrared photography. Specifically the one in the Standard IR row and the "Auto WB Unretouched" column. Is there any way to verify that this is what has happened to this camera?

An example picture of a good dog.

posted by clockwork to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (12 answers total)

This doesn't look like IR to me. Are you able to shoot raw files with it rather than jpegs? Shooting raw will bypass any white balancing that the camera is doing. Then, is you have software that can open it up, you'll get a better idea of whether the camera is shooting correctly and if some setting is just misbehaving.
posted by jonathanhughes at 11:35 AM on February 9, 2020

Do you have a infrared remote control, like for a TV? Try pointing it into the camera lens and pushing a button. If the camera's IR filter has been removed, it will look like a bright flashing light in the live preview; an unmodified camera should only pick it up faintly, or not at all.
posted by teraflop at 11:37 AM on February 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

If you don't have an infrared remote control, you can try anything that's hot but not incandescing in the visible spectrum. E.g., warm up a frying pan, turn off the stove and the lights (in that order!), take a photograph.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 12:11 PM on February 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

That isn't infrared.
posted by Chitownfats at 12:15 PM on February 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

That's not infra red it's just broken or the settings are off. Try resetting it completely to factory and go from there.
posted by fshgrl at 12:28 PM on February 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Camera sensors are not sensitive to thermal infrared, so I don't think a hot frying pan will show up in any case. The IR emitted by a remote control is "near infrared," which camera sensors without an IR filter will pick up strongly.
posted by whatnotever at 12:35 PM on February 9, 2020

Best answer: I have taken thousands of photos with an infrared-converted camera. The picture you uploaded is.inconclusive. Dog fur pretty much doesn't look different except for the photo having a red cast.

Take a picture of a new-ish five dollar bill. If weird stripes show up in the picture, you've got an infrared. If it looks the same, no dice.

Another option: take a picture of a freshly-shaven adult male. If his skin is glowy white, but you can see the beard under his skin, infrared. The top layer of skin is translucent to IR, so even spotty-beard me looks like an Italian movie star.
posted by notsnot at 12:46 PM on February 9, 2020

Response by poster: Hmm... Thanks, everyone. I took a $5 bill picture and it doesn't look like this one, so I have to assume the camera is just garden variety busted.
posted by clockwork at 1:41 PM on February 9, 2020

Olympus cameras have a selective color mode so before you toss it make sure that’s not on or just reset the whole thing to defaults (menu->reset->full).
posted by fedward at 1:56 PM on February 9, 2020 [3 favorites]

I use a olympus digital camera that has been modified for fullspectrum photography (UV-visible-IR). It looks very much like this if I don't do a manual white balance correction.
posted by dhruva at 6:32 PM on February 9, 2020

Response by poster: After re-reading the link whatnotever supplied about camera sensors it dawned on me that I had taken the $5 bill photo under compact fluorescent lights, so I took it outside and photographed it again under sunlight. The stripes are clearly visible, so it seems like it's definitely picking up some spectrum of infrared. They're not totally white like the wikipedia photo, but they are clearly visible.
posted by clockwork at 11:53 AM on February 11, 2020

Clockwork, can you PM me?
posted by notsnot at 10:55 AM on February 22, 2020