So, I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now. I’ve put it off until now out of fears of breaking my old camera, which in a way I have.
Infrared photography is something I’ve been captivated by since I first saw Aerochrome film photography. There’s this really great collection called The Enclave by Richard Mosse that’s shot on infrared sensitive Aerochrome film.
In the past I’ve tried recreating this look through editing, but it turns out there’s a way to actually capture infrared data using a digital camera. It just requires some permanent modification.
Digital cameras typically have a built in filter covering the sensor that blocks nearly all infrared light. This both protects the sensor itself from intense light and keeps your photos from looking like an alien world.
I’ve had this breakdown guide of my 10 year old Sony RX100 bookmarked for months. A few days ago I decided to spend the morning working through it, knowing full well that a number of things could potentially go wrong that would totally ruin the camera, but this isn’t the first I’ve modded this camera at that risk.
I wound up with a region locked version of this camera, so it always used to be stuck in Japanese until I found this firmware mod to unlock it. Another mod that could have bricked the thing. Needless to say, this camera has long outlived it’s usefulness to me over the last 10 years. So I decided that this might give it a new lease on life.
In the end it only took about an hour to disassemble the camera down to the sensor, remove the filter, and put the camera back together again.
No ribbon cables ripped, no screws lost, but I didn’t quite manage to remove the filter in one piece. There was no damage to the sensor itself other than being covered in glass dust, which was mostly taken care of with some puffs of air.
I wouldn’t exactly recommend doing this but if you have experience working on small electronics and have an old digital camera collecting dust, why not?
I have a few more things I want to do with this camera now, like experiment with black and white infrared, and color channel swapping. These colors might do cool things with data-bending too. Updates and maybe a video to come.
This post came from my Patreon.
May 21, 2025
Elijah Davis
