This ‘50s Camera Body Hides a Modern Chromatic Surprise

As a hobby, photography is as much about the experience of shooting as it is about producing the perfect image. The current digicam craze certainly proves that. But the TLR (Twin-Lens Reflex) viewfinder arrangement, which was popular in the early and middle 20th century, provides a unique experience that is almost non-existent today. To get that experience back, Beach gave this 1950s Kodak Duaflex II camera a modern chromatic surprise with his PI-CAM-IR-A.

Kodak produced the Duaflex II in the early ‘50s and if you can find one in good condition now, you’d be hard-pressed to actually use it. The Duaflex II takes square photos on 620 film, which isn’t available anymore. So, you’d have to find a suitable substitute (like 120) and then reroll it onto a 620 spool in a darkroom. For most people, the effort simply isn’t worth the result.

Beach’s solution was to replace the Duaflex II’s film-handling innards with modern digital hardware. And as a bonus, he chose hardware for capturing infrared photos.

The light spectrum goes well beyond human-visible light in both directions, to infrared on one end and ultraviolet on the other. Unlike your eyes, digital camera sensors detect infrared light. That’s normally undesirable, so manufacturers add filters that block infrared light. Omit the filter and you’ll capture infrared light alongside visible. Then, if you block the visible light, you’ll capture just the infrared light. That’s what Beach did here to snap otherworldly and surreal photos.

The hardware Beach used to achieve that includes a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a 3.5” Waveshare touchscreen LCD, an IMX219 image sensor (sans IR filter), and a visible light filter.

A quick word on that filter: it looks red-tinted in the photos, which means it doesn’t block all visible light. If it did, it would look black to human eyes (or an IR filter-equipped camera). So, the filter Beach chose is probably one that lets at least some red light through, rather than infrared light alone.

Beach doesn’t provide details on the software running on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W or the user interface, but he does say there is HDR (High Dynamic Range) functionality. Regardless, the captured photos look great.