I began shooting IR in early 2000 with a Tiffen filter on the front of my Nikon digicam lens. In 2002, after reading a very interesting article by James Wooten called “Removing the IR Blocking Filter or How to Ruin Your New Camera,” I moved to the next level and converted my camera for IR only. The idea was if you removed the internal IR blocking filter you would improve the performance of your camera by increasing the speed. A typical shutter speed for an unmodified camera (with a filter screwed in front of the lens) was 1/8th second. With the internal filter removed it would be a speedy 1/250th. Mr. Wooten went on to say that modifying a camera was a very risky endeavor. You could ruin a perfectly good camera! But the results would be worth it if you succeeded. A tripod would no longer be necessary, and all sorts of moving subjects could be frozen at will. Mr. Wooten went on to demonstrate how to remove the IR blocking filter and replace it with a piece of clear glass. He speculated that “it would be interesting to put a visual blocking (IR) filter in there.” I agreed, and when I converted my Nikon 4500, that’s exactly what I did. As far as I know, I was the first photographer to replace the blocking filter with not a clear, but an actual piece of IR glass. As a result, the camera could only shoot IR, but no external filter would be needed. I could use my lens attachments; fisheye, wide converter, and tele converter, on the lens where the old screw on IR filter used to be. This expanded my creative potential exponentially and for me, a new art form was born. High speed digital near-infrared photography.