Full Spectrum Portraits and What’s Next
A quick look at the results and a few new ideas I need your help with
Hey all,
Hope everyone’s getting a great start to the week! I spent some time in the studio this past Sunday and decided to take some full-spectrum portraits with my friend Tajanna.
Here’s a little tour of what my studio looks like (it’s a bit of a mess… :D)
I decided to use no filter so I could capture both visible light and infrared in the shot. I didn’t want to go full ghost-hunter vibe on this one—the goal was to use the IR light to naturally soften the skin and brighten her eyes.
Lighting-wise, I used continuous tungsten lights with umbrellas. I’m really old school that way and prefer them over LEDs. The added bonus is that tungsten lights emit a fair bit of infrared!
For lenses, I went with my crappiest C-mount CCTV lenses just to see how they’d look. This one is an unbranded 8mm f/1.4 fixed-aperture lens. I honestly love how tiny it is and originally bought it for my Raspberry Pi HQ build.
Anyway, enough of the technical stuff—onto the photos! Here’s how they turned out:
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with the results and may consider doing full-spectrum portraits more often. I did edit these a bit to bring out more contrast.
New Poll
On a side note, I have so many new ideas I want to build and would love to get your input on some of them.
1 — Create a “lite” version of the waist-level viewfinder.
This would run on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W to reduce cost and power draw. The tradeoff is a less powerful processor, which means removing features like focus peaking, film simulations, and a high-resolution preview.
2 — Build a screenless manual-focus point-and-shoot.
This one would be geared toward street photography. It’d basically be photography on “hard mode”—zone focus only, paired with a separate optical viewfinder.
3 — Start selling custom-adapted lenses.
Over the years, I’ve collected a ridiculous amount of obscure projector lenses that I’ve adapted for my mirrorless cameras. I’ve gotten pretty good at building adapters, and a lot of these lenses are just sitting in the studio gathering dust while I focus on building camera bodies.
I can only focus on so much at once, so I’d love your feedback! I created a poll where you can vote on these ideas. Feel free to leave your own ideas in the comments as well if there’s something new you’d like me to try.
As always, thank you for the continued support. I’ll check in with you all soon.
Cheers,
Malcolm