I would like to take some pictures, or at least, be able to view in infrared. Something totally excluding the visible wavelengths is prefered. My ideal solution would be to have something akin to a digital camera or camcorder with which I could angle the lens and view the infrared image on the viewing screen.
Any suggestions on how to do this?
What’s the application and budget?
I’m pretty sure you can combine a low-cost night vision viewer with an IR filter to achieve this goal. Perhaps something like this. (It’s an electronic night vision viewer, not a camera.)
If you are talking about the near infrared, wavelengths out to maybe 900 nm or so, then many cheap CCD and webcam cameras will do this. You’d want to add a lowpass or longpass filter somewhere around 700 or 750 nm, to block visible. One way to try your camera is to point the remote for your television at it, and see if you see something flickering. I think many remotes use 940 nm LEDs but am not certain.
If you want further out in the IR like 7 to 13 um, then the cheapest video camera I have seen new is a $7000 model in the Edmund Optics catalog (they were Edmund Scientific before, and Edmund Salvage before that). These cameras see the glow emitted by living creatures, for example. I have one and they’re a blast. A leading maker is FLIR. Their name is an acronym for Forward Looking Infra Red, a term describing what they put on military vehicles to see the enemy in total darkness.
You could also get a lens of, say, Zinc Selenide, and focus an image on a liquid crystal sheet. If you get the right temperature range sheet, you could shift its temperature a little and make out an image by focusing the lens on it. Zinc Selenide is nice because it goes all the way out past where you care about, and also works as short as red and orange wavelengths, so you can see what you’re doing when you build and test your device (note the focal length will be a little different visible versus IR).
It seems that I’ve read somewhere that any digital camera or camcorder can see IR if you remove the filter that is installed when the unit is built. This requires major surgery to the camera, and will definitely void your warranty.
A quick Google produced this.
I’ve tested my TV remote by pointing it at my digital camera and looking at the viewscreen. Worked just fine.