Within living memory, a corn grinder was called a grist mill. Now it's a gadget you see on teevee, a rotating abrasive cylinder designed to remove dead skin from one's feet.
Until recently, when tornadoes approached we could only hide best we could until they passed. But now, through the groundbreaking work of scientific advisers to low-budget made-for-teevee movies, we have learned of the scientific consensus that tornadoes can be made to disappear entirely by throwing propane torch cylinders with flares taped to them into the tornadoes. This also has the benefit of killing any sharks the tornadoes might contain, which is not often an issue here but it might work on largemouth bass and catfish as well.
But of all the marvels of the modern world, my current favorite is a digital camera specially modified to make pictures in the near-infrared spectrum.
I had toyed with this before, by placing a very dark, almost opaque, red filter over the lens of a conventional digital camera. The results were pleasing, but there were problems. The sensors on digital cameras are equipped with "hot filters" that keep infrared light from getting in. The fact that the red filter experiment worked at all was due to the hot filter on that camera not being very good. Even so, it was good enough to force long exposures and other issues.
A quick trip to the camera doctor and the camera no longer had a hot filter but instead a filter that allows only infrared light (and a little bit from the visual spectrum for color; otherwise, it would be the black-and-white of night-vision cameras).
In the old days we could shoot infrared film, but we never had any idea what if anything we'd captured until it had been processed. With a modified digital camera, things are a little more predictable and we can see the results (and make camera adjustments if necessary) at once.
There are surprises: most sunglasses become transparent, as if untinted, when photographed with an infrared-modified camera. More startling, so do black plastic garbage bags. One imagines that this would be of interest to the police investigator who does not have a warrant to search some black plastic garbage bags.
You can get a little infrared floodlight that fits in the camera's accessory shoe and lights up the outdoors (or indoors, but it's mostly useful outdoors) invisibly to the human eye. You can then see through the camera's finder the illuminated scene, because the sensor is attuned to infrared. The results are monochromatic and not especially attractive, but you can get a picture where otherwise no picture would be possible.
Yes, you're right: it's a stunt. The practical aspects are limited. But it's a stunt that can produce some stunningly nice effects.
For instance, here's a picture of Baker Center, taken with the infrared-modified camera and a fisheye lens. Modern fisheye lenses let you control to some extent the distortion they introduce; in this picture the only real distortion visible is the straightening of the street, which actually curves around in front of Baker Center. But that's the lens. The infrared part is the leaves on the trees and bushes, which instead of green are a kind of pinkish white, due to that wavelength being reflected by them. The bricks and much of the rest becomes a blue-gray, while the sky gets dark and the clouds become very bright. Glass in the windows reflects as if they were golden mirrors.
You can imagine why infrared is popular with landscape photographers. And it's always possible to remove the color altogether, producing very striking black-and-white pictures.
It has not so much found a home among portrait photographers, though I'm coming to love making people pictures with it. The always-photogenic Meredith bravely sat for a picture and even more bravely gave me permission to publish it as an illustration of what infrared color pictures of people can look like.
The tint in her glasses is gone and the color of her hair has been altered. Her lips have been turned blue. But what makes infrared interesting for photographing people is the luster it gives to the skin. People captured in infrared photography seem almost carved from jade. If I were to desaturate the picture – remove the color – and either save it as black-and-white or in, say, a sepia tone, it would be a very nice picture and you might never guess that it was largely photographed outside the visible spectrum.
I think that this is cool as all get out. Maybe you do, too, maybe not. It could be of limited practical value – deep-infrared photography has important scientific uses; near-infrared not so much – but it's probably as useful as foot sanders and ways of shaking the sharks out of tornadoes.
Source: Come one, come all – check out Dennis' new, amazing camera
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