Canon Powershot A480 Infrared Mod Review

Over the past few years I have been vaguely aware that you could load infrared films into cameras, though I had never tried it.
During a family get together recently my wife's uncle, (a professional photographer) showed me a modified micro 4/3rds camera. I believe it was a Panasonic DMC GF3.

Turns out that leaves, grass etc. turn a vivd white in IR (infra-red) photos and clouds become very well defined as the sky looks somewhat darker. People are also affected eyes look a little 'ghostly' and clothes/hair can take on a different tone.

My friends in the photo have very dark hair in real life!    

 In this shot Hiro is actually wearing a black t-shirt

And another example of IR eyes courtesy of Mijonju Check out his Blog 

I really wanted to try out an IR modded camera on a timelapse shoot, after scouring ebay I found a seller who mods them himself - infraready

He was extremely helpful and rushed out a Canon Powershot A480 which arrived just in time for my Japan trip.


The A480 came out in 2009 so its a couple of years old and was never the best camera around, but it is cheap and for the purposes of modding with a view to making some IR time-lapses it was fine.

It has a 10mp sensor and shooting at the highest resolution is more than sufficient for even 1080p HD video.


On most digital cameras there is a permanent filter in place which blocks light in the infrared spectrum. On these modded cameras the filters are removed.





It was my intention to install the CHDK firmware hack which would enable time-lapse shooting. There was precious little time to attempt this before I left for Japan and although I installed the firmware successfully I could not get the time-lapse scripts working.

This scuppered my plans of shooting infrared time-lapses until I came up with the idea of using a clamp to hold the shutter button down in continuous shooting mode.

This gave me no control over the interval but it was quick and it worked!


I'm sure I'll get all the firmware working now I'm but I just didn't have time to spends playing with settings etc. whilst in Japan with lots of other things to do.




On some of the shots in the video below I ran the camera with the CHDK hack active for control of focus and some other parameters. In the last shot I used the camera with standard firmware.