Black and white film suggestion

To further what Rodeo_Joe said, picking a brand of conventional B&W film, shooting it, then sending it to a lab to be processed in an industrial line and then scanned with a Fuji Frontier with the usual default tone destroying auto leveling and halo inducing USM will make your friend feel more angst than less.

Who would fuss over film in the 21st century when one has access to the brush and canvas!...LMAO. Edited April 23, 2018 by Moving On

By the way, no film goes to the far IR, which seems to be 15um (15000nm) down to the high microwave range.

 

Far infrared - Wikipedia

By the way, no film goes to the far IR, which seems to be 15um (15000nm) down to the high microwave range.

 

Far infrared - Wikipedia

 

Even mid-IR is beyond what our cameras are capable of.

 

At least in chemistry, taking measurements in the mid-IR region is routine. I take care of 3 mid-IR spectrophotometers at work, and I'll go out on a limb and say that having access to one even in undergraduate teaching labs has been an accepted standard since the 1970s.

 

In any case, if you open one up you'll find that MOST of the optics are curved front-surface mirrors. Any transmissive optics are made of salt-usually potassium bromide. The two classic ways to put samples in one are either to use a thin film of a liquid between two plates of sodium chloride, or otherwise to grind up the solid and press it into a pellet with potassium bromide. The most common technique involves placing the sample on top of an IR transparent crystal ground such that it has total internal reflection-the one I work with uses a diamond.

 

I'll also add that I've been trying to get the money to fix one older instrument that has some capabilities none of our other working ones have. My biggest enemy is that it was stored in a humid room for several years. One of THE key parts, the potassium bromide beam splitter-a solid KBr crystal about 2" in diameter and 3/4" thick-has clouded and also "dripped" to the point where it's caused corrosion elsewhere. That's about a $3000 part to replace.

EBay........;)