My BLOG about my journey into the invisible world of ultraviolet UV photography, simulated bee, butterfly and animal vision photography and the special lenses, filters and lighting needed to make it work - also in HD video + 3D stereo.
Amazon UK has the BBC DVD already on pre-order, release date has been shifted to May 3rd, 2010.
This the PAL version, most likely only viewable in Europe.
I would assume there will be a Blue-Ray Disc also, since it has been produced in full HDTV, but I have no further info on that.
The first idea which might have caused softness was IR leakage, but since that special XBV2 filter stack used includes an IR suppressing filter, this was not the reason.
Since I have an alternative filter stack called XBV2a, I tested it against it - with a a big surprise: A much sharper result could be obtained.
All shot using UV-Rodagon 105mm at f8 using Xenon high Power flash and otherwise identical conditions except the filters used.
It gets very obvious, that the use of the XBV2a filter results in much improved sharpness, whereas the XBV2 filter result looks rather soft (1:1 pixel presentation).
Here now the two images full size:
XBV2 (old version):
An inspiration by Bob Friedmann showing his excellent VIS and UV images on nikongear.com. I wondered how orchids would look like in simulated bee vision using my "multispectral in one shot" filter XBV2.
Here it is, simulated Bee Vision shot using XBV2 filter, high power UV flash, UV-Rodagon 5.6/105mm....and no focus shift.
[click on image to see a larger one]
BBC London has finally announced its new trilogy "Invisible Worlds", now called "Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds" since it will be presented by famous "Top Gear" presenter Richard Hammond on BBC1 "World of Wonder" in the UK and Discovery Channel in the USA.
The series is directed by Dan Clifton.
The DVD is already on pre-order at amazon UK here (PAL version).
Quite a while ago BBC asked me to contribute my knowhow and some of my work of the invisible to their new three part science series "Invisible Worlds". The first part of the series will be about the natural world and things we humans cannot see, but other species can, like bees, birds, butterflies, spiders, mice etc. because it may be in a spectral area not accessible to our human eyes, but to them.The following image is a test image, not related to or used from the BBC series but one of my test stills from that time I worked on that... (yellow flower = as we humans see it; right blueish part of the flower and butterfly = simulated tetrachromatic butterfly vision; UV = blue)
[click on image to see it larger]
[this is a test shot from my own lab while preparing, not from the final series and unrelated to BBC, just to be clear...]
I would like thank Dan and his great team of "Invisible Worlds" for the opportunity to contribute to that series. It was my great pleasure to work side-a-side with such a professional and committed team!
