Specialty Cameras

You can find any number of specialty cameras on the market, depending on your purpose. Are you looking for a camera that will have good night vision? Perhaps you should invest in an infrared camera. Maybe you would like to play around with a semi-professional photography career, in which case you want to use a medium format camera. You may even be a scientist studying the depths of the ocean, requiring a highly advanced underwater camera. Specialty cameras flood the market, and you have only to determine what you would like in order to pick out your next purchase.

If you are looking for something that is inconspicuous for investigative purposes, many spies, private investigators, and government agents make use of pinhole cameras all the time. These miniscule specialty cameras can be incorporated into a ring, a button, a pen, or another instrument that would never be suspected and used for snapping shots without being noticed. These are also popular devices for assuring that your maid isn’t stealing and your babysitter isn’t hurting your child.

For those who are working underwater, especially scientists, excavationists, and others interested in the oceanic depths much as astronomers have long photographed the skies, you will want a good, solid waterproof camera. These specialty cameras are in watertight housings and come in many varieties. While you can find standard point and shoot cameras with pressure resistance up to about 40 feet, professional cameras and camcorders can tolerate hundreds and even thousands of feet of water, using lights and sometimes infrared imaging to record signals.

In terms of infrared specialty cameras, some of these are also important for night vision and are used frequently for military operations, seeking body heat and following the motion of these sources with different color readout. These are also excellent for hunting, especially in dense forests where even daylight will not adequately penetrate the canopy for a reasonable view of the animal life beneath.

Medium and large format cameras are also specialized for their own purposes. Usually, these are used by professionals to create images of the most impressive clarity at different sizes. The medium format camera uses sheet film that is about double the size of the standard 35mm film, meaning that an image blown up onto the same size 4x6 prints will have twice the number of pixels and be of much greater clarity. Large format cameras work with specialty sizes, exposing images onto sheet film that is 8x10 and even larger.