According to the Encyclopedia of World Climatology, lightning happens about 40–50 times per second worldwide; that translates into almost 1.4 billion flashes per year. But of the 1.4 billion that happen in 2011, we’re pretty sure this was the only one captured at 11,000 frames per second, turning a one second lightning flash into an incredible 6 minute experience. Read more…
Want to shoot insanely cool Matrix-style “bullet time” footage at home? You can do so with a single rig built out of relatively cheap components.
NASA spaceship engineer Mark Rober came up with a brilliant way to shoot eye-popping imagery using just a GoPro camera and a cheap ceiling fan. Read more…
After reading the great reviews of the Fuji X100S, I decided to take the leap and buy one. I’ve been getting more interested in street photography lately, and this camera seemed like a good fit. Plus, it’s supposed to sync at all shutter speeds, which is great for flash photography outside in bright sun. David Hobby and Zack Arias both have nice in-depth reviews.
But, things are rarely perfect. It turns out that the X100S can’t sync at f/2 unless you’re at around 1/1000 or slower on the shutter. Nice, but still, I was curious why that is. So I decided to run some tests to figure it out. Read more…
One of the interesting ideas involving slow motion cameras (i.e. high speed cameras) is to move the camera very quickly during shots, resulting in footage that looks like the camera is moving in real time while everything in the shot moves in slow motion. Last year we shared an incredible demo reel by German studio The Marmalade, which uses this technique.
Caleb Kraft over at Hack A Day was inspired by this concept and by the bullet-time rigs that have gotten quite a bit of press lately, and decided to try his hand at moving slow-mo footage using a single GoPro. Read more…
Photographer Florian Knorn recently took a Fastcam SA4 high speed camera — ordinarily used for observing things like ballistics and fluid dynamics — and pointed it at a Sony HVL-F58AM flash unit, capturing what a camera flash firing looks like when captured at 500,000 frames per second and then slowed down to to 25fps. Read more…
Combining the capabilities of a high-speed camera with the basic idea that “there are enough [magical moments] happening every moment of any given day,” New York artist James Nares is currently captivating audiences at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mesmerizing video “Street.” Read more…
It’s not uncommon for digital cameras to have burst modes as fast as 10 frames per second these days — especially in mirrorless and pellicle mirror cameras — but do you think you have a good understanding of just how fast 10FPS is? If not, check out this video by YouTube user krnabrnydziobak, who pointed a Phantom Miro eX2 at a Nikon D4 to see what 10FPS looks like when captured at a staggering 1920FPS. Read more…
Remember that slow-motion wildlife footage that consisted entirely of still photos animated with parallax? French photographer Sebastien Laban does the same thing, except with his wedding photographs.
In the video above, all the apparently 3D scenes you see are actually the result of using some After Effects magic on ordinary 2D photographs. Read more…
What do popping soap bubbles look like up close and slowed down? That’s what Gav and Dan of The Slow Mo Guys recently decided to find out. They used a pricey and powerful high-speed camera: the Phantom v1610, which costs upwards of $100,000 and can shoot up to 1,000,000 frames per second.
They didn’t up the FPS that high, though (the resulting videos would take an eternity to watch). Instead, they chose to record at a much-more-reasonable 18,000fps (at 720p), and used a macro lens in order to capture the beautiful details of the bubbles as they disintegrate. This is the slowest footage the Slow Mo Guys have ever captured, and the results are quite beautiful.
When tasked with making the music video for the song HAVOC by While You Slept, Frokost films decided to get a little creative. In addition to shooting the whole thing in slow motion, they managed to shoot the entire music video using just one 18-second continuous shot. Read more…