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UltravioletPhotography

Posts I'd Like To See :)


Timber

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Hi,

 

I can't state enough how much I love this site for the information it provides. It really shows all the expertise, enthusiasm and energy that you guys put in this site. Thank you :D

 

As I am a total beginner in this field, and I believe compared to most of the people, who are having way more insight and knowledge in the world of ultraviolet spectrum, I am kinda like an UV-Hippie :D I do love to shoot in UV but many times I feel like I have no idea of what I am doing :D

 

The one thing I found a little hard about this site is it requires a great amount of technical knowledge. I am missing a post for the absolute beginners. For example at UV Fauna it says: "Please do not use artificial UV illumination (flashes, LEDs) in such a way as to harm animal and insect eyes.". Which is a really good thing as I am often pissed off when at Zoo people just shoot the poor animals with flash and I can just imagine how much it annoys them, but I do believe most people does not realize the harm a flash can make... But one thing came to my mind reading this note is if I don't have the knowledge of it how can avoid the harm? Like how a led UV light can do any harm? For the average person (like me) a LED light seems absolutely harmless, we have 100 LED video lights used for long periods of time... so it didn't even cross my mind that in the UV spectrum it could make any harm (I have a 54 LED UV light). Or a Black Light bulb sold on E-Bay... I got 2 of them that I used for some of the self portraits before, and got skin rashes, similar to sunburn by the evening, especially at the part where I have vitiligo (nothing serious) as I was holding them quite close to have enough light at some point... at least now I have nice tanned face :)

 

And also lens wise... the sticky with all the lenses showing good or excellent performance in UV is great, but I believe most people does not have those lenses to start with, so everyone tries their best with the gear they have. Again my example, from my glasses I had the Sigma EX D 30mm giving me way better results than most other lenses, so I believed that's a good performer (along with my Helios 44M, which has quite similar "good" results among my lenses). Now I got my hands on a Domiplan 50mm and an Autocrat De Luxe enlarger lens, and the difference is really visible, measurable. I do believe much more lenses were tested than what's listed in the list, but they did not make the list as their performance was not good enough. But what I was thinking it should be a great help to beginners if those lenses that were not good for UV get their own list, so people will know there's no point wasting time and money on them.

 

Basically I am missing a Beginner's Guide to UV Photography, where terminologies, basic equipment instructions, health and safety warnings (I find that very important) would be collected all in one place, so if someone is interested in UV photography would have a quick guide where to start. I am happy to contribute to it, but I am just afraid I might have too many questions and might annoy people with asking things that are obvious to most people on this site. It could even contain a "Beginner's UV Set Guide" with a few easy to find, cheap, good UV performer lens options, filter options, light source options and protective equipment so people could have a basic idea about the budget it requires to start with and help people avoiding to put their money to the wrong equipment.

 

I do believe UV (and IR) photography is one great way to create unique images and it's much more than just some crazy scientists' hobby or forensic investigator's stuff :) (when I asked a photographer friend about UV photography that was kinda his answer in a joking manner... "It's only good for flower scientist and murder investigators". I guess he just didn't want to admit he has no idea about it :) )

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Timber, in addition to the link that Alex has provided to Klaus Schmitt's tutorial, I think that a great deal of - perhaps most of - what you are looking for is in our Stickies (including a link to Klaus's tutorial).

 

Right at the very beginning of Sticky #1 we list what is needed to make a UV photograph.

Then we talk about the listed items in some detail throughout the rest of the Stickies.

 

What do you need to make a reflected Ultraviolet photograph ?

  • UV-Capable Camera: UV light must be able to reach a UV-sensitive sensor.
  • UV-Capable Lens: UV light must be able to pass through the lens elements.
  • UV-Pass Filter: Visible & Infrared wavelengths must be blocked.
  • UV Lighting: Sunlight or artificial UV illumination is necessary.
  • UV Eye Protection: UV light is harmful!

For each bullet point, there is a following paragraph or two of general information about Camera, Lens, Filter, Lighting and Eye Protection in Sticky #1 with pointers to lots of specific details in later parts of the various Stickies.

 

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The Health & Safety Warnings are mentioned in Sticky #1 if you scroll down about 3-4 screens worth. Links to additional facts about UV hazards are provided.

 

Regardless of what is emitting the ultraviolight light - UV lightbulb, UV fluorescent tube, UV flash, UV LED, welding torch, sunlight - the short wavelengths of UV can be damaging. The simplest damage example is one we have all experienced - sunburn from staying out in the sunlight too long. It gets worse from there - cataracts, skin cancers, DNA damage.

 

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A list of lenses which do not work for UV? Short answer: Most lenses do not work well for UV.

However you can force UV through almost any lens if you don't mind long exposures or really long exposures.

But the resulting photograph may have some flaws.

 

....a few easy to find, cheap, good UV performer lens options...

I am not intentionally trying to be discouraging but simply truthful when I say that none of the UV-capable lenses are easy to find and most are not cheap. However don't give up, UV-capable lenses are not impossible to find and some are affordable. It just requires some effort and patience to through Ebay and Amazon listings.

 

What we know about UV-capable lenses is listed in the Lens Sticky #2.

The first 3 UV lens lists contain expensive or rare UV-capable lenses.

Go to the last section section titled: UV Lenses: Good UV Response with Some UV-Vis Focus Shift

In this section you will find UV-capable lenses which may have a reasonable price on Ebay or Amazon. Prices fluctuate a lot. For example, Petris could be had dirt cheap before it started to become widely known that some of them were UV-capable, then the prices increased. But there is not a large market for UV-capable lenses, so prices started to fall. And so it goes.

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Andrea, I know that post that was one of the first posts I've read on the site. That post is very valuable but it's a bit way too informal and people can still get lost in the maze. It's kind of an instruction manual to the maze and what I am thinking about is more of a walk through for the first section, kind of a tutorial. Like a more practical guide for someone who wants to start with UV. I just checked Klaus' tutorial and I think that's exactly what I've had in my mind. With practical advice about which lens/filter/etc. to buy. :)

 

Oh... and I just got an enlarger lens I haven't seen on the list... my brief initial tests shows me that it's better performer than the Rodenstock Rodagon 80mm f5.6 and the Nikon EL-Nikkor 50mm f4. The lens is called Autocrat De Luxe 75mm f3.5. It's heavy (compared to the other 2) and quite sharp. I will do a more tests for all three spectrums (UV / VIS / IR) and will post a review here. It was dirt cheap (£14.50 inc P&P) and I am really excited to further work with it (expect some more portraits soon :D) The flange distance is longer than the Nikon F's and I guess there's enough room there for a helicoid, so even on Nikons I can imagine it to focus to inifinity (on Sony NEX even the Nikon EL-Nikkor 50mm f4 has infinity :) ). Oh and it has 10 blades aperture! Even stopped down it's bokehlicious! The only drawback that it has no filter thread at all... so mounting a filter is a little tricky.

 

ps.: Sorry if I "spam" too much... I promise it all comes from my enthusiasm! :D

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Thing is there are a lot of warnings in the Stickies which don't crop up in brief tutorials elsewhere. I encourage you to read them!

 

I could try to write more about the pros & cons of certain choices. Maybe that would be useful.

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Yeah that would be awesome... because it's quite hard to find good information on the internet about different choices... for example I was thinking to get a U330 filter to peak into the deeper wavelength... but then I don't have the lens for it... I have a bit experience in IR and as totally untrained in UV I was thinking that the lenses might have the same problem as in IR, aka hotspot. But now after a lot of trial by error test I realized that it's the transmission that matters for a lens. Like I believed my Sigma 30mm is a good performer... but now I have the enlarger lenses which perform around 1.5 stops better... The problem is, for a beginner there's nothing to start with to be able to compare his equipment... Like if we could have a measurement like "If your photo of a sun-lit subject is 1/1000 at f8 on ISO 100 then a good UV performer should give 1/100 at f8 on ISO 400." so then there would be a starting point, a standard (or an origo) for one's equipment... So we could "categorize" a bit better what's excellent, good or bad for UV photography as anyone can make a comparison of the visible EV and UV EV. Then there could be a scale like for example: EV difference up to 6 is excellent 6.01-9 is good, 9.01-13 is mediocore... etc. I still don't know what should be the average difference between visible and UV photo for a sun-lit object (so that would give the maximum UV performance, isn't it?). I still feel like I am lost in the dark as of which of my lens could be considered as a good performer... I can only know that which of my lens performs the best... but what if my camera is not suitable for UV, as I've read some of the Canons are not good for UV. And also not sure if a lens in the Good Performer list needs to be polished or not? Are they good without it or will only become good once they received the elbow grease :D So many questions and I can only try to guess the answers... That's why I was thinking of a beginner's guide so people like me could have a starting point and would feel less lost :)
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I think we simply do not worry about the EV thing all that much.

The prevailing mantra has been if you can get the shot in UV, then the lens is good for UV.

 

I certainly agree that is a confusing attitude for a beginner, but I'm not sure that what you are looking for can be provided.

 

Remember that UV varies in sunlight by time-of-day, time-of-year, geographical location (altitude, latitude, longitude) and physical surroundings (reflections, trees, buildings.) Thus anything we might provide by way of actual exposure data must be considered only in context of those variables.

If I take my UV-Nikkor outside here in NJ and shoot at f/8 and ISO 100 in an open space at sea level on a sunny September day at noon, then the exposure speed I use to make this shot will change if I make the same shot in April at 2PM in Norway or if I make a similar shot on top of a mountain.

 

UV exposure data can also depend on the filter type and filter thickness, camera sensor and distance from subject.

 

So you can see the problems inherent in trying to provide some baseline exposure data from which other lenses may be judged on their UV-capability. There is no way outside a laboratory scenario to ensure that each lens is used for a test shot under a specific unvarying set of test parameters.

 

In short, the only way to truly know a lens's UV-transmission capability is to measure it with laboratory equipment: spectrometer, monochromator & integrating sphere. A few measurements like that exist. We have those lenses on the List.

 

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I'm not sure what you mean by "polishing" a lens? Do you mean removing some coating? If that is what you are referring to - then no, the lenses on our Lists do not need to be polished.

 

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Can someone please provide an average difference between a UV and Visible exposure made in strong sunlight ??

Would it be something like 10-12 stops??

 

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A lot of this becomes much clearer with experience. It takes about a year of shooting UV to get a real feel for the variables. Just practice with what you've got !!!

 

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A lot of the data you would love to know is missing simply because there are not a lot of practitioners of UV photography and almost no UV gear testers. Klaus has some data on his website about specific transmission capability of some lenses. We hope to get more data from someone, someday. The equipment is very expensive.

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Once upon a time, I did a concurrent test series with D40 and D200 using my UV-Nikkors to try to find the UV response of these cameras. The test was published on the old Nikongear site, if anyone would care to search for it. It's a few years back in time, so might have been the D40X instead of the D40.

 

Two basic observations were made: firstly, the cameras behaved differently when the exposure was off the optimal range; secondly, the range in which useful response occurred was quite broad. Thus compared to ambient light, in UV anything between 8 to 12 EV below could be utilised (depending on the purpose of the shot, of course. If low noise was a goal the 10-12 EV range would be preferred).

 

Do note that the experiment was conducted using daylight as the [uncontrollable] UV source, thus some variability in response is to be expected.

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  • 1 month later...

For those of us not wielding custom quartz apochromatic lenses, a few rules of thumb seem to apply in the UV realm as far as optics go:

 

-Check lists. Klaus Schmitt's compendium of lenses and their UV characteristics is highly useful, and is still being added to.

 

-Older is often better. Newer lenses often incorporate more technology to block UV radiation; often, older lenses were made when such measures were less important. Since most b&w photography in the 20th century used colored filters anyway, and since these filters were generally opaque to UV, manufacturers had less incentive to engineer the lenses themselves to block UV in an era when few consumers used color film. Color film did not take off as a mass-market item until the late 1960s where I lived, and only with color film was specifically blocking UV important.

 

-"Faster" is not always really faster. Fast lenses have wide elements with great center thickness, which means lots of total glass thickness in the optical train. This is the opposite of what you want, and may lead to greater UV attenuation as well as disproportionately poor short-wavelength performance. Lenses with a small aperture generally have thinner elements.

 

-Lenses with mid-wide-angle to short-telephoto focal lengths have the least glass thickness as a rule. The farther you depart from this range, the more glass you are likely to be shooting through, with all that implies.

 

-If you can stand the image quality, an interesting exercise is to use a pinhole optic. These, uniquely, are both dirt-cheap and do not block UV at all. You may not get any great art, especially with small sensing media; but you can get a feel for the basics without breaking the bank this way. Filters can be taped to the front if needed.

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For UV-Capable Lenses see our Lens Sticky. I've lost count how many lenses we have. Along with a nice write-up of what to look for.
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