Hang On Little Tomato

I'm generally a slow-poke when it comes to projects. I don't pop them out at spit-fire speeds. Since this blog is still quite new, I'm going to pad it out a little bit my 28 year back-catalogue of unblogged projects. To keep things simple for the narrator I'm going to discuss things I did 4 months ago as if I did them yesterday. By choosing to read further you are explicitly releasing me from any responsibility for damage incurred as a result of confusion of the narrative tense.

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Here's a list of thing's you'll need to do this project at home:

1. Mutant Tomato
2. Tiny Saucer
   
3. Pink Martini Album
4. Hoya R72 Infrared Filter
5. Digital Camera and Tripod
   
6. Halogen Bike Headlamp
7. Tolerant Girlfriend
   

Amazingly enough, the oddest items on this list (1, 3, 4, and 6) all arrived within days of each other. Shelley was obsessed with the copy of "Hang On Little Tomato" (the Pink Martini album) that finally arrived from the library. The season was changing and I needed a headlamp for my now-nocturnal bike commute. I got an IR filter for my camera just for the heck of it and a strange little mutant grape tomato showed up in our groceries. Convergence like this was definitely a sign.

Here's the thing about infrared filters for cameras (it should be noted that they don't filter out IR, they filter out almost everything but IR). Your camera is sensitive to infrared light. This would make your photos look weird except that the camera manufacturers put a filter in front of the camera's sensor to remove most of the IR spectrum: most, but not all. You can get some of this sensitivity back if you stick a special filter on the front of the camera that takes out everything but the IR. The only drawback is, you now have to deal with a seriously long exposure time. Long exposures can be an asset too.

Why would you want to use an IR filter? Simple, it makes things look unusual. Chlorophyll reflects a ton of it, so plants look bright white in the IR spectrum (pictures of trees tend to look like cherry blossoms).

So anyway, while listening to China Forbes do her thing I set up the tripod, the x-men vegetable, and a little teabag saucer. All I needed now was a good source of IR light.

You know how halogen lights like to set stuff on fire? IR light happens to be very closely related to heat. Good thing I got that bike headlight.

Enjoy, and hang on little tomato.

(As a footnote, I do have a signed model-release form for the tomato, and it was not harmed in the production of this work. However, we did eventually eat it)