The #ShittyCameraChallenge: Trichromes, Aerochromes and more with the Olympus Camedia C-100

The #ShittyCameraChallenge: Trichromes, Aerochromes and more with the Olympus Camedia C-100

Finally I got my hands on a real glitchy camera, with a sensor well past its prime, the Olympus Camedia C-100, a 1.3-megapixel fixed-focus digicam released by Olympus in 2001. I reckon the camera is overexposing by around 10 stops, and normal daylight images are completely blown out, but I have a cheap variable ND filter, that on its maximum setting produces much more 'natural' images.

Of course, what I like to do with most new (to me) noughties digicams is see how they work for making trichromes, and what their infrared response is to make digital aerochromes. So off I went 'around the block' to the woods behind our house armed with my trusty travel tripod, the Camedia C-100 and a collection of filters, including the variable ND filter. 

The snag with this camera is that it doesn't have a black and white mode, although you can desaturate a colour image through the menus. So what I did was to screw the Neewer variable ND filter to each of the red, green and blue filters and take the photographs through this. Because the 720nm infrared filter already has about a 10-stop filter factor I just used the filter on its own, and thus seemed to work. Of course, with the sliding cover I couldn't fix the filters to the front of the lens so had to hold them in front of the camera, so this was prone to some light leaks.

On the whole it worked a treat. The failing sensor produced quite pale images, even with the combined ND/colour filter arrangement, but when the images were combined together in GuIMP photo editor produced some lovely 'painterly' results. When making the RGB composites in GuIMP I first desaturated the colour images and then chose the colour levels for the red, green and blue layers. 

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