What type of cameral should I use to see smoke, Thermal?

Question

I got an idea to film a concert, and I want to be able to see all the smoke in the air.

Should I use like a thermal camera? or infrared?

I want something that will make it look like this...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=AwMJAPRi7mU&feature=related

thanks

Answer 1

The thermal infrared camera detects the longwave infrared radiation of warm bodies.  It effectively displays differences in temperature by coding them with different colors.  Aside from being very expensive, unless there's a huge fire underneath, there's no reason to think that the smoke in the air would be at a significantly different temperature than the rest of the air, so I don't think it would do a thing.  

A standard infrared camera looks at shortwave infrared, which is not radiated by most objects around room temperature.  Instead, it relies on an infrared source that is invisible to the naked eye, but is visible to the camera.  usually used for discreet surveillance.  Infrared light, having a longer wavelength than visible light, might be less prone to see smoke due to the small size of smoke particles.  Light passing through smoke looks reddish brown because the longer red wavelengths are less scattered by the smoke.  Blue and violet light are more scattered by smoke, which is why smoke in sunlight looks bluish.  

So if you want to see smoke well, I would get an ordinary  camera and put a blue filter on it (maybe change the final picture to black and white so it doesn't look funny).  Also, some cameras have a ultraviolet blocking filter built into them.  Part of the purpose of this is because UV is scattered so much by the atmosphere (stuff like smoke), that pictures tend to look more hazy without a UV blocker.   If your camera has this built in, remove the UV blocking filter and you should see smoke better too.  If you have control over the lighting, use lots of blue light.