Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Friday, December 11, 2015

40 Pounds of Heat and One Foot


I have been piddling around with a thermal imager for a few days.  I may need the device for an upcoming study on an electrical distribution system.  I am learning how to capture, store, and export images in a more usable format.  For practice, I have been shooting stuff around the house.

Thermal imaging devices offer an alternate and particularly narrowed view of the physical world.  Surface textures, profile details, our normally registered wavelengths of color, and the senses of three dimensional space are sacrificed in favor of recording the stark heat signatures of whatever the camera is fixed on.  There is no delineating living and non-living things.  Everything is registered on a simple scale of temperature.

A thing is hot or a thing is cold.

The images fascinate me.

Posted today are some images I captured with the imager I am learning to use.  In the first capture, you see 20 pounds of housecat standing in my kitchen.  The next image reveals the “heat prints” the cat left on the floor after he walked away.  In the final image, I caught my foot in the foreground and another 20 pounds of housecat sprawled on the living room carpet in the distance.


--Mitchell Hegman

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