Photography and lighting notes

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Digital

On digital ISO

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

tl;dr:

• higher ISO means more gain during readout of the sensor.

• Which can be seen as more sensitivity,

since it's just amplification, it increases the amount of signal as much as the noise

...but it's a little more interesting than that due to the pragmatics of photography (and some subtleties of electronics)

• You generally want to set it as low as sensible for a situation to avoid unnecessary noise -- or leave it on auto to have the camera do the same

For context, ISO in film indicates the grain size in photo rolls - see ISO 5800.

Roughly: Smaller grains bring out finer detail, but require more light to react for the same amount of image; larger grains needs less light for the same amount of image so can be seen as more sensitive but larger means coarser.

ISO in digital photography (see also ISO 12232) is different. It's named that mainly because it's the closest analogue to that analog effect we just described.

For context, a digital sensor is read out in steps, something like

charge in sensor pixel wells ---> row readout --> analog amplifier ---> digital conversion

In that, ISO is the amount of amplification (basically, what gain to use before feeding the signal to the ADC). ...okay, but what does that do? What does it amount to in practice?

So what does that ISO / gain change?

Given the same image in there, read out with different ISO, it will mainly change the scale of the values after conversion to digital.

It would mainly affect brightness, but only because of amplification after the fact -- it has no direct effect on the amount of light accumulated in the sensor.

However, since it is one of the physical parameters the camera chooses (alongside aperture and shutter time), it can choose to trade off one for another.

For example, in the dark, a camera on full auto is likely to first chose a wide open aperture (for the most light), and then balance ISO with shutter time -- high ISO and shorter shutter time would increase noise but reduce motion blur from shaking hands. ...but on a tripod, longer shutter time at more moderate ISO might look better.

In lighter situations there are more such tradeoffs, e.g. controlled via modes -- for example, portrait mode tries to open the aperture so the background is blurred, sports mode aiming for short shutter time so you get minimal motion blur, but at the cost of noise, and more. But most of these are explained mostly in terms of the aperture/shutter tradeoff, and ISO choice is relatively unrelated. Choice of ISO is usually "as low as is sensible for the light level".

...but, varying only a little with the sensor size (and, technically, the electronics of the readout), there is generally no benefit for ISO settings over 3200 or so. The image will get brighter, but is just as noisy, and high enough ISO actually starts reducing the aperture and shutter options you (or auto mode) have.

Still, you can play with it.

Note that the physical parameters are chosen with the sensor in mind - to not saturate its cells (over-exposure) {{comment|(also other constraints, like avoiding underexposure, signal falling into the noise floor, and in general also tries to use much of storage range it has (also to avoid unnecessary quantization, though this is less important.)

As such, when you force a high ISO (i.e. high gain) but leave everything else auto, you will effectively force a camera to choose a lower shutter time and/or smaller aperture.

Which means less actual light being used to form the image, which implies lower signal-to-noise (because a noise floor is basically a constant). The noise is usually still relatively low, but the noise can become noticeable e.g. in lower-light conditions.

Similarly, when you force a low ISO, the camera must plan for more light coming in, often meaning a longer exposure time. On a tripod this can mean nicely low-noise images, while in your hands it typically means shaky-hand blur.

In a practical sense: when you have a lot of light, somewhat low ISO gives an image with less noise. When you have little light, high ISO lets you bring out what's there, with inevitable noise. Leaving it on auto tends to do something sensible.

Lens filters

ND filters

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Neutral-density filter, a.k.a. ND filter, sometimes gray filter, reduces the intensity of all wavelengths.

It's filter on all colors equally.

Yes, it just blocks some light.

"Why use an ND filter when I have aperture?"

You can do without, but it gives you more options.

Yes, you can change avoid overexposure with a narrower aperture, but that also increases the depth of field.

This can be particularly important in video, for consistency between shots, but if also relevant in photography if you wanted that bokeh-y effect.

As to the numbering: ND2 blocks one camera-stop worth of light, ND4 is two stops, ND8 is three stops, etc.

It goes up a lot more, but you are unlikely to need that in regular photography.

https://nisifilters.com.au/docs/a-guide-to-using-filters-to-their-maximum-potential/neutral-density-filters-nd/how-strong-is-my-nd-filter/?srsltid=AfmBOoqGth-7eUpJzmllUalfqy8WbyRWasTBXxLeqKtqDflZlrCuTVTQ

Infrared

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Infrared and digital sensors

A digital camera sensor construction typically means they have sensitivity that runs a little into IR (and a little into UV on the other end).

Since infrared is a huge range, this is actually only near-infrared to start with, and only a smallish part of that.

For reference,

our eyes see ~700nm (~red) to ~400nm (~violet) (what we call visible light),

while CCD and CMOS image sensors might see perhaps 1000nm to ~350nm, with the (larger-numbered wavelengths being the infrared part)

For most purposes - mainly optical photography - this sensitivity is a bug rather than a feature, so there is usually specifically a filter to remove that sensitivity.

Changing that sensitivity

Broadly speaking, there are two things we might call "infrared filters": IR-cut and IR-pass.

Which do exactly opposite things of each other.

two IR-cut filters from webcams. Looking through them looks slightly blue, the other is the same type but angled to emphasize the reddish reflection.

• IR-cut filters are the thing already mentioned above: on image sensors, these will strongly reduce that 700-1000nm IR response, to focus on human-optical sensitivity
  • (this turns out to be easier to add separately, than to design the sensor itself to be more selective(verify))
  • this is often a a glass filter directly on top of the camera image sensor, because you'd want it always and built in
    • which look mostly transparent, with a bluish tint from most angles (because they also remove a little visible red)
  • the cut is actually a suppression, with a transition range, somewhere around 740...800nm
    • ...so filtering isn't perfect, and near-IR might still be visible, particularly if bright. The best example is IR remote controls, often in the 840..940nm range, which send short but intense pulses, which still tends to still be (barely) visible. Beyond that, there are very few sources of IR that aren't also bright in visible light, so this smaller leftover sensitivity rarely matters much.

• IR-pass, visible-cut filters

often look near-black to our eyes

cut everything below a transition, somewhere around 720..850nm range

using these on a camera that has an IR-cut will give you very little signal (it's much like an audio highpass and lowpass set to about the same frequency - you'll have very little response left)

but on a camera with IR sensitivity, this lets you view mostly IR without much of the optical

If your camera's IR-cut is a physically separate filter, rather than a coating, you can remove that to get (back) the sensitivity that the sensor itself has

doing so leaves you with something that looks mostly like regular optical, but

stronger infrared sources will look like a pink-ish white.

things that reflect IR will also light up this way, e.g. black cotton shirts now look lightish

White-ish because IR above 800nm or so passes through all of the bayes filter color filters similarly

pink-ish mostly because infrared is next to red (verify)

This is why IR photographers may use a color filter to reduce visible red -- basically so that the red pixels pick up mostly IR, not visible-red-and-IR.

Which is just as false-color as before but looks a little more contrasty.

These images may then be color corrected to appear more neutral, which tends to come out as white-and-blueish

Notes:

• visible-and-IR mixes will look somewhat fuzzy, because IR has its own, slightly different focal point(verify)

• DIY versus non-DIY NIR cameras

they'll never do as well as a specific-purpose one, but it's close enough for creative purposes

image sensors are usually made for color, which means each pixel has its own separate color filter (see also color filter array). Even if you remove the IR filter, each of these may also filter out a little IR

There are also NIR cameras, which are more refined than most DIYing, because they select sensors that look further into NIR (verify), or sometimes are designed to be specifically sensitive there

• You can't make a thermal camera with such DIYing - those sensors are significantly different.

Thermographic cameras often sensitive to a larger range, like 14000nm to 1000 nm, the point being that they focus more on mid-infrared than near-infrared

If you want something with some IR sensitivity

Products exist, but this is not a very common ask. Ready-made solutions include

some security cameras (note that that gives you an option of a visible floodlight OR an infrared floodlight),

the Raspberry's NoIR camera,

something called arducam (moves the IR-cut in and out mechanically so can be both regular and night camera).

DIY notes

If you want to do this yourself, you may want to remove a webcam's IR-cut filter - and maybe put in an IR-pass filter.

• In webcams the IR-cut tends to be a glass in the screwable lens, which may just be removable
• For DSLRs the IR-cut may well be a film or coating on top of the sensor, which can be much harder to deal with without damage.

two IR-cut filters from webcams. Looking through them looks blue, they reflect red. These two are positioned at different angles to emphasize that.

While in DSLRs the IR-cut is typically one of a few layers mounted on top of the sensor (so that not every lens has to have it), in webcams, the IR-cut filter may well be on the back of the lens assembly

See also:

• http://dpfwiw.com/ir.htm#ir_filters

• https://kolarivision.com/articles/choosing-a-filter/