DIY Infrared Filter (with Floppy Disk)

Following up on my last crafty geekery post, I decided to find another use for old floppy disks I found in the trash. This time I decided to make an Infrared Filter for my old Canon IXUS 800i point & shoot camera.

The basics behind infrared photography is wanting to use a filter to block as much of the visible light spectrum as possible & instead rely on Infrared Light, which is non-visible to humans normally. One of the great properties of old magnetic media is that it does exactly that, so all i had to do was to find an old floppy disk & then dismantle it so that I could cut a small piece of film to use as a filter. I then found a kinder suprise package was a perfect fit so I cut out a hole in that & superglued my filter over it, being sure not to touch the plastic filter with my fingers as it stains very easily.

After a few attempts I managed to get it glued neatly, so i finished it off by both painting it black & also covering with gaffer tape, to be sure that no unfiltered light would leak in. Because you are blocking out so much light I also had to modify my IXUS 800 i to run CHDK so that I could tweak the ISO & exposure times in order to get a decent shot. I’d very much love to experiment with IR photography with my 5DmkII but i hear that they have some very good IR blocking filters already built into the camera & they don’t work as well as older camera models with infrared filters.

Today was a sunny day so i got to the park to test the filters capabilities.. Here are some results. Although I still have a bit more tweaking to do, I’m still pretty pleased with the results.