Slashdot Mirror
Exhibition of High Speed Photography
Dantastic writes: "If high-speed projectiles, breaking glass, and hot plates sound like fun, check out this site." No news here, just some really nice photographs. I didn't realize a tennis ball deformed that much.
What always impresses me about these pictures is remembering the guy, Harold Edgerton, who came up with this technology as well as side scan sonar. What a guy.
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
http://profile.sh/high_speed_photos/
I've only got 50K/s outgoing, so I'm sure I'll get slashdotted too.. but it will at least give *some* people a chance.
Especially the leaping milk drops. They look like a bunch of tall skinny people. This must be the perfect science project for kids, and for once the results are something that's good enough to frame and put on a wall. And it also teaches that things are not always what they seem, and there's beauty in the details. And (stretching or contracting) time changes everything.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
I actually took the high speed photography course that these pictures came from while I was in high school (North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics).
:)
It's really amazing how easy taking most of these pictures is. All you need is a camera that can be held open indefinitely, a flash unit that can be triggered externally, and a whole bunch of black cloth. That and a soldering iron
Unfortunately my work wasn't cool enough to make the show. I guess Dr. Winters didn't like apples being hit by arrows. It makes lots of apple sauce really fast though...
Here's an index of sonic boom photos
...the instantaneous freeze frame of "Lighting A Fart"
I guess they did that one after a few drinks at the lab on a Friday afternoon
:)
You don't need special equipment, just a camera with a flash. It does help to have a SLR though. I did this back in HS for my final project in photography class. I had a water baloon exploding, a hatchet smashing a lightbulb, milk drop in a bowl, and a ice cube splashing into a glass.
The hardest part was figuring out how to trigger the events remotely, since I didn't have a helper. I just needed to take a dozen pictures of each thing to get a few that turned out well. I would take one that was early, like an ice cube just above the glass, and then a better one where the ice cube was in the glass and water was splashing out to make a sequence. You can't tell that it's not the same ice cube.
I used to work for a studio that did high-speed film work for ejection seat testing. One day the film crew got a hold of a digital camera that was able to do high speed video. I didn't ever learn a lot about it but it couldn't produce a full frame of video (768x512??) because the chip and the processing unit couldn't store information fast enough. It was also in black and white. Even with it's limitations we had a blast with that thing. We dropped nails, lit a match, broke a light bulb. Just about anything that we thought would look cool in slo-mo we did. Doing it the old way (as this studio still does) requires film processing and then transfer to video. It's basically a pain in the butt. So there is a lot of intrest in the high-speed community for a digital camera that can produce full frame video in color. Does anyone know what kinds of technology would be requried to make something like that possible? What if the 'gigapixel' cameras in the future had a 'slow-mo' mode? Imagine all the fun we could have!