Petrie Island

Petrie Island is fantastic location at the east end of Ottawa. It has a beautiful sandy beach, wetlands, and wooded areas with several walking trails. A variety of wildlife live or visit here on their annual migrations. The Urban and Nature Groups of the RA Photo Club organized a joint outing to this location. I went with a friend and spent the morning exploring the area with my camera. It was mostly overcast and we had some light rain later in the morning. This was my first opportunity to really try out my Nikon OEM Hot Mirror filter with my infrared-enabled camera. Cameras are built with a "hot mirror" filter on the sensor to remove UV and IR light that would otherwise contaminate a visible light image. Infrared conversion removes this filter and replaces it with something else. In the case of a full-spectrum conversion, the something else is clear glass or quartz. An advantage of this conversion is that "normal" camera operation can be restored by adding back an external hot mirror filter. But depending on how that is done, there can be image quality issues when using wide angle lenses. The options are to use a filter on the front of the lens or one that can be installed in the body of the camera just above the sensor. The latter eliminates the wide angle issues (in principle) and is the option that I chose. Thus, I was especially eager to use my wide angle lens to test this and I spent half of my time in the beach area. To my eyes, the external hot mirror filter seems to work perfectly, even with my widest lens. This confirmation, and the photo opportunities that I found, made this a very successful outing for me.