Ever since I got my wonderful Canon T3i a couple years ago (which I STILL think is the sweet-spot in DSLR price/performance/features), I’ve had a perfectly good 10MP Canon XTi body which has been essentially gathering dust. What to do about this…. I could sell it, although unfortunately, older generations of DSLR bodies depreciate pretty severely in spite of the fact that it’s still eminently capable.
A better option: convert it to an Infrared body. This procedure can be a DIY modification, although it is NOT for the faint of heart. I’d been thinking about this for a long time so I was excited when it came up in conversation that a coworker of mine repairs/resells DSLRs as a hobby. It sounds like this might actually happen sometime in the next few months.
In the meantime, I noticed this really badass timelapse video shot with an infrared DSLR:
There’s a great explanation on Bad Astronomy of why thing appear they way they do in infrared. Basically plants reflect a lot more infrared light than any other color–including green! When you get these photos out of the camera, they appear almost all red in color, so heavy-duty post-processing is needed to get these greyscale scenes with blue skies. I’ll need to learn about all that to get to the point of making videos like the one shown above, but I don’t think it’s anything beyond my abilities. Time will tell, but it’d be awesome to make something like this…