The Eyes Are the Window Into the Soul

Hi everyone. Be glad I didn’t share the rest of that photo with you. It’s a selfie taken with my infrared camera, and I look a bit like a walrus. You may see it someday, but not today.

I’m toying with taking photos as art with this camera and seeing how it goes. It’s not the kind of thing everyone has or sees, and there are interesting aspects to it. I was thinking about that option when a regular reader mentioned those images have a painterly aspect to them. Her description is apt, and helps me understand what attracts me to them.

So, in the future, you might see more photos like that.

But what is this stuff anyway? In multiple email exchanges in the last week, several readers referred to an “app.” And while it is true an app is involved, the real work is done by a hardware extension to my phone. Voila:

That’s my Pixel phone (in a cheap red case with a clear back that always collects grunge like that… sorry) with the FLIR ONE Gen 3 IR camera attached to the USB-C port at the bottom. It has a completely separate camera inside it — one that captures infrared light — as well as a battery that has to be charged independently of the phone. An app from FLIR (the company) knows how to talk to the camera and capture images from it. Once captured they are stored on the camera like normal, as if they came from the regular camera itself. There are versions of the camera for both Android (with USB-C) phones and iPhones.

Using this thing is much like using the regular phone camera, except there is no focus, it updates every couple of seconds to keep all the IR values it is seeing in range (in terms of the colours displayed on the screen), and every photo it puts out comes with a horrible “FLIR” watermark in the upper left.

First step to creating art with this is a reliable way of wiping out that watermark. I’ll see if I can figure out how to make that disappear soon.

Last week I suggested our installation of snow melting equipment by the downspouts on our roof would prevent all future snow and ice this season. Well…

Not quite, I guess. But it didn’t stick around and I never turned the heating mats on. Temperatures in the forecast stay above 0° C, so I think this is an abnormality. Murphy is still doing his job.

The rest of this week vanished in a haze of preparing the monthly email for the community association (I’ve volunteered to help out with that, at least for a while) and numerous updates to the community association website as well. You’d think I’d have something nice to show for that, but the only things are the image and opening paragraph below, both of which are my own creations:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Except February, which has 4,378.

That’s how I was taught it, anyway. And for the shortest month of the year, February can definitely drag on. Just look at the holidays it contains:

• Groundhog Day
• Valentine’s Day
• Groundhog Day
• Family Day
• Groundhog Day

I rest my case. But really, February does have some positives. A bit of snow and World Nutella Day among them. (Say, why isn’t that on the list of official holidays anyway?)

Seriously, with our lovely woods and friendly neighbourhood, February doesn’t have to be all bad. Enjoy it!

I think that winds up this post. Please try not to be haunted by my glowing purple glasses!