Shooting 4.5 million frames per second of molecules using an x-ray flash is impressive, but can non-scientific cameras come anywhere close? The answer is yes: Vision Research has a new Phantom high speed camera called the v1610 that can capture footage at a whopping 1,000,000fps. Granted, the resolution needs to be a paltry 128×16 for that fps, but at a full 1280×800 it still shoots at 16,000fps. To give you an idea of what 1 million fps is like, consider this: 1 second of the footage will provide you with 9.25 hours of uber-slow motion 30fps video.
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.
Photographer Alan Sailer works out of his garage shooting things with a high-speed pellet rifle and photographing the results using a homemade flash unit. An interesting series of photographs he has, titled “The War Against Christmas“, involves filling Christmas tree ornaments with various things and shooting them for unique explosions of texture and color. The photograph above shows an exploding ornament that was filled with washable kids tempera paint. Read more…
Last year we featured a pretty neat slow motion video shot from a moving train. British band SixToes decided to use the same idea for a music video, placing people all along the platform doing various things, and slowing down 7 seconds of footage into an entire music video.
The idea could be improved on by having what’s happening on the platform reflect what’s being sung in the song, but would require tons of planning and perfect timing — though the end product would be totally mind-boggling.
Flickr user Vincent Riemersma shot this beautiful photograph of colored liquids splashing up the side of wine glasses champagne flutes using a Nikon D300s, a custom rig for sliding the glasses down a ramp, and a sound trigger. Read more…
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.
Graeme Taylor took his Casio High Speed EXILIM EX-FH20 camera and shot some 210fps footage out the window, resulting in some pretty beautiful slow-motion footage. On his blog Taylor writes,
In all my slow-motion work so far, I’ve used a static camera to capture a high-speed event. But, I wondered, what would happen if the camera was the fast-moving object? For instance, if you use a 210fps camera at 35mph, on playback at 30fps it’ll seem to the observer that they’re moving at walking pace- but everything observed will be operating at 1/7th speed.
What I’d hoped to do was film the people on a railway platform from a train as it blasted past, but since the places they don’t stop at tend not to be listed in the timetables, this would be hard to co-ordinate. I figured that being at the very front of a fast train as it approached a stop would suffice; although the ‘frozen in time’ effect is less pronounced towards the end of the video, the platforms at non-stops tended to be mostly empty, so there’d be less to capture anyway. Helpfully, people don’t seem to move too much as their train arrives!
Now someone needs to take this idea to the next level with a Phantom camera and a bullet train.
In 1877, photographer Eadweard Muybridge settled a longstanding debate on whether or not a horse completely leaves the ground at any point during its gallop by taking a single photograph of a horse completely airborne. In the same way, photography was also used recently by a group of researchers to uncover the mystery of how cats drink. Read more…
Here’s something to add to your list of “random but awesome things to shoot if you ever get your hands on a Phantom camera”: popcorn popping. The exploding kernel above was shot at 6200 frames per second with a Phantom v12 and played back at 25fps.
