When Eadweard Muybridge shot the first motion picture of a galloping horse back in 1878, he used 24 individual cameras placed 27 inches apart, using trip wires to fire off each camera one thousandth of a second after the previous one. With fancy high-speed camera rentals priced at thousands of dollars a day, YouTube member Destin came up with a Muybridge-esque technique for capturing a bullet flying through the air using an ordinary DSLR: he shoots a bullet for each frame and uses a fancy trigger to capture the bullet at increasing distances, combining the resulting images into a neat super slow motion video.

(via DIYPhotography.net)

Last week we shared the awesome fact that chickens have image stabilized heads. If you’ve been wondering about it, it’s actually called the vestibulo-ocular reflex. Naturally (and… nerdily?) people started suggesting that someone should try making a steadicam using a chicken. Well, YouTube user Destin actually went ahead and did it… The results can be seen in the video above.

Turns out those crazy high speed photography shots you see of bullets shattering things aren’t as difficult to achieve as you might have thought. All you need is about $20 and some brains (aka circuit skills). YouTube user destinws2 shows how its done in this 5 minute tutorial.

Here’s a Flickr set with some example photographs taken with his setup.