Blue Ridge Paranormal

Everyone who has a nightvision capable camcorder knows that if you take it out in direct sunlight that the screen just goes white. Recently Blue Ridge Paranormal has been testing the idea of using an infrared filter to block out all of the visable light to allow your camera to work in nightvision during the daylight. Even a still camera without nightvision is capable of taking infrared photos, this was proved by Richard Liebeck in 2007 on a trip to Gettysburg PA.

He used a digital Kodak camera with a Hoya R-72 infrared filter and captured a photo on Triangular Field of what appears to be a civil war soldier in period clothing. On most digital cameras the photo will appear a deep purple color, you must take the photo and open it up with a photo editing program and transform the photo to grayscale, and if your program has an autofix program, this will usually make it much clearer. We recently purchased a Sony DSC-H50 that is a 9.1 mp digital camera with nightshot, with a filter the nightshot feature works even in direct sunlight and you do not get the purple color in your photo. You will still want to use your photo editing program to do the things we mentioned earlier. This same thing can be done with your camcorder by using a filter, you will need to determine the size filter size and experiment with different  ones, there are filters from 720nm to over 1000nm. You must determine which one will work best for your camcorder in direct sunlight. We have found that R-72 seems to work best for still cameras.