Super slow motion footage captured by high speed cameras usually shows slow movements (if any), but German studio The Marmalade came up with a brilliant way of speeding up the movements: a high-speed robot camera operator.
Our groundbreaking High Speed Motion Control System ‘Spike’ brings the creative freedom of a moving camera to the world of high speed filming and so enables us to create shots that would be impossible to achieve otherwise. ‘Spike’ can freely move the camera with unparalleled speed and precision, thereby removing the previously existing creative limitation of having to shoot high speed sequences with a locked camera.
By marrying the hardware of a sturdy and reliable industrial robot to software that was built from the ground up for the demands of motion controlled high speed imaging, we developed a unique system for creating real life camera moves with the ease of use normally associated with 3D Animation.
The system does camera moves that are exactly repeatable, allowing them to be slightly tweaked until the shot is just right. Read more…
Photographer Jack Long has an absolutely amazing series of photographs titled Vessels and Blooms that features liquid flowers captured by shooting high speed photographs of splashes. The images are not faked with Photoshop, but are instead single exposures that result from months of planning and testing. Read more…
Cinematographer Jim Geduldick was lucky enough to be the first to test out Vision Research’s new Phantom Miro M120 high-speed camera in the real world, and — luckily for the rest of us — is kind enough to share the results. Falling on the smaller, more rugged side of the Phantom line, the M120 is made to take, well, exactly the kind of footage Geduldick captured. The camera can shoot a whopping 1540 at full 1080p HD, and is estimated to cost anywhere from $25,000 to $60,000 — a bargain compared to the price tags on its more expensive siblings.
This past Monday was the 182nd birthday of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who became famous for his high speed photographs of galloping horses. In 1965, the US Department of Defense commissioned this short documentary titled It Started with Muybridge, which tells the story of how Muybridge’s early photography experiments contributed towards the advancement of science and technology during the Atomic Age.
Here’s a camera shop promo that features the Nikon D4 filmed with a Phantom Gold high speed camera. It shows what the camera’s 11fps shutter and iris mechanisms look like when captured at 1000 frames per second.
Here’s an interesting video tutorial by Destin of Smarter Every Day that shows how you can capture amazing photos of guns being fired and their muzzle flashes. Here’s the “basic” idea: he uses a piezoelectric transducer to convert acoustical energy into an electrical pulse, which he sends through a pulse generator. The pulse from the pulse generator is used to trigger a flash and an high-speed exposure. This allows him to photograph guns at the moment they’re fired in the same way many people photograph lightning. Read more…
Destin of Smarter Every Day wanted to show how a DSLR shutter works, so he pointed a Phantom high speed camera at a Canon 60D and made this slow motion video showing the magic that happens every time you press the shutter.
Here’s an interesting look at the amazing camera being developed at MIT that shoots a staggering one trillion frames per second — fast enough to create footage of light traveling:
[...] the researchers were able to create slow-motion movies, showing what appears to be a bullet of light that moves from one end of the bottle to the other [...] Each horizontal line is exposed for just 1.71 picoseconds, or trillionths of a second, Dr. Raskar said — enough time for the laser beam to travel less than half a millimeter through the fluid inside the bottle.
To create a movie of the event, the researchers record about 500 frames in just under a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second. Because each individual movie has a very narrow field of view, they repeat the process a number of times, scanning it vertically to build a complete scene that shows the beam moving from one end of the bottle, bouncing off the cap and then scattering back through the fluid. If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years. [#]
They believe that the technology may one day be useful for medicine, industry, science, or even consumer photography.
Canon’s new 1D X DSLR shoots at a whopping 14 frames per second, but did you know that it’s not the first Canon SLR capable of that frame rate? Nearly 30 years ago, back in 1984, Canon unveiled the “F-1 High Speed Motor Drive Camera”: a camera powered by huge battery packs that could chew through a roll of film in 2.57 seconds.
Canon’s new 1D X can shoot full frame 18-megapixel JPEGs at a whopping 14 frames per second with mirror-lockup. Drop down to 12fps, and you can shoot RAW images while continuously tracking the subject using AI Servo mode. Here are a couple videos that give you a feel for what 14fps on the 1D X is like. Read more…
