Daylight Infrared Photography - “How to” guide for taking ghost photos in daylight.


This method was invented by Scott Crownover of GhostsRUs.com, who was also featured on the documentary “Ghosts of Gettysburg”.  It’s a great way to easily add a fantastic ghost hunting tool to your arsenal… cheaply!

Here’s the scoop:  Unlike standard FILM cameras, digital cameras have the ability to photograph and record the infrared range.  Let’s have a quick science lesson here… light is made up of wavelengths, and the frequency of this wavelength -designated in nanometers (nm)- determines it’s color.

This is illustrated in the above picture.  The range of “visible light” is from roughly 400nm to about 750nm.  Anything BELOW 400nm is considered “Ultra-Violet”.  These are very active waves, often destructive, and include the damaging rays of the sun.

Above 750nm is considered “Infrared”, and these are longer, lower energy waves.



Relevance for Paranormal Investigators...

Ok… why do we care about this for ghost hunting?  Well… the infrared range has given us some of the most compelling visual paranormal evidence in the history of the field.  Take “Ghost Hunters” for instance… where does T.A.P.S’s good video evidence usually come from?  That’s right! Their nightvision cameras and thermal cameras!

Plus, it’s not a stretch of the imagination that if this paranormal evidence we are after is very LOW ENERGY -such as only being able to leave voice impressions on electrical recording devices vs. making them audible to the human ear- we would need to block out the higher energy wavelengths that could be interfering with our capturing of them. 

So you are getting the point!  While nightvision technology is relatively affordable, you are obviously hindered by the fact that the cameras are only usable during night time. That can cause lots of issues, of course, being that there can be safety and security issues associated with night time investigations.

That’s where the brilliance of Scott Crownover’s method comes into play.  Since digital cameras already have the ability to capture the infrared range, all we have to do is block out visible light and adjust the shutter speed to capture the image!  We do this simply by a infrared lens, and using the manual shutter speed setting that is on many digital cameras!



How to...

There are several types on the market, but a really cheap, good one (that has caught amazing evidence) is the Hoya R72.  It’s about $40 or so, and comes in a variety of different sizes.  We use the 49mm size, and I’ll explain why in a minute.

The “72” on the product designation refers to the fact that it blocks out all wavelengths below 720nm on up.  From the science lesson earlier, we know that is essentially right on the border of visible light and infrared, so we are sure that we are blocking out most of the other wavelengths of the visible spectrum.  Hoya also makes a R90 that blocks out everything but the “far infrared” (900nm on up) but I personally don’t know if anyone has captured paranormal evidence with this lens.  I’ll update this if I find out otherwise.

All you simply do is attach the lens over the lens of your digital camera.  Scott Crownover’s camera lens is flat with the surface of his camera, so he is able to just tape the lens on.  He recommends plumber’s tape because it leaves less residue.

However, with my Sony, the lens protrudes out of the surface.  You know… when you turn it on, the lens shoots out!  So, we came up with a very simple solution for this that involved a part from Home Depot that was no more that $1.50…

This is a “Sink Repair Lavatory Pop-up Drain Gasket”, and it’s measurements are 2” outer diameter x 1 1/4” inner diameter, x 3/8”.  Unbelievably, this gasket slides snuggly right inside the rim of the IR lens, and the smaller hole fits very well over the lens protrusion of the Sony!  I had to use a few “linings” of electrical tape to make it more snuggly fit the camera.

Anyway, the end result looks like this…

...and it works very well.

As I said earlier, you have to adjust the shutter speed on the camera.  Scott Crownover recommends somewhere between half a second to a second, and I find this to be true as well. 

Unfortunately, this means that it is a necessity to use a tripod!  With shutter speeds this long, it’s frankly impossible to keep the camera steady.  Also, you need to take more than one picture of the exact scene so you can compare them.  This also makes the tripod mandatory.

This method works the best in the brightest outdoor conditions, but you can tweak it a little with various shutter speed/aperture settings to get fair pictures in the shade, etc.

Ok, so the picture are going to look like a Martian landscape!  Often, people will use their photo editing software to convert them to grayscale.  This makes it a little more like what we are used to seeing, and there are less distractions from our eyes seeing something so fanciful:

As I said, taking more than one picture is necessary so just in case you capture something, you can compare it to others.  It also helps if someone is video taping the entire event, because sometimes you can’t quite make out what you are looking at, and it’s good to have the video as a reference source.  Basically, the more sources you have to compare your IR photography to, the more compelling any evidence you get will become!

The best method to search these pictures is to constantly flip between the similar ones and look for differences.  Here is an example of an “anomaly” that you try to look for:

Is this a TRUE orb, and not the “fake” ones that result from flash photography??  Well, no it’s not (I zoomed in and saw that it was just a light pattern on a tombstone)… but you get the point of what we are looking for!



The “Motherload” of Evidence by this method...

You’ve probably seen these three pictures before, so I won’t go into much detail about them here.  All of them were taken using this method around Gettysburg, VA… the first two by Scott Crownover, and the third one by Craig Rupp:

Further information about these pictures is located at the site at the top of the page (as well as the “Ghosts of Gettysburg” video), but needless to say, there weren’t any people in these pictures when they were being taken, and this is corroborated by other pictures and video.

So, that’s how you do this!  Lose the “fake orb” flash pictures… get out there and get some real evidence!

-Lowcountry Paranormal



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