Cameras can make the invisible, visible. In this case, the magic of slow motion makes it possible to watch as a bullet smashes through 5 lit light bulbs, tearing through the frame at 62,000 frames per second and sending white-hot filament and shards of powdered glass in all directions.
In 2002, a renegade science photographer, Martin Waugh, was playing with high-speed photography and discovered he could image two drips of water hitting each other.
Camera technology has come a long way in the last two decades; heck, it's come a long way in the last 5 years. But sometimes even decades old tech can keep up, like the Nikon F3H SLR and its burst mode that maxed out at a blazing fast 13fps in 1996!
I've been doing high speed photography for a while, now but I've doing it manually. After some time you get used to the timing but will still miss some of the shots, and with high speed photography you can't afford to miss that one perfect shot. MIOPS is a $239 smart trigger that helps you nail the shot in high speed photography.
Last year, Sony controlled around 40% of the $8.7 billion image sensor market. Now, Sony is looking to take on a new challenge: building small high-resolution sensors for the mass-market that can capture images at 1,000 frames per second. If this sensor makes it to the market, Vision Research's Phantom high-speed cameras may have some stiff competition on its hands.
High speed photography is all about fast-flash; the faster your flash, the faster the instant you can adequately freeze on a digital sensor. Modern strobes are pretty good at this, with flash durations as fast as 1/20,000 of a second, but a Bristol-based company Vela Labs is about to take high-speed photography to unheard-of heights.
Introducing the Vela One, ‘the world’s first high speed LED flash' that boasts a flash speed starting at 1/2,000,000 second, or 500 nanoseconds.
One of the biggest challenges of shooting 4K Ultra HD footage is the sheer amount of data you're processing. That's about 30 8MP photos coming into your camera every single second. But the old FOR-A FT-ONE and the new, smaller, FOR-A FT-ONE-S scoff at your measly 30fps.
These cameras, while they definitely don't come cheap, earn every penny of their price tags by capturing 4K footage at up to 900fps.
There's a rule of thumb when it comes to viral dog photography: what's cute with dogs is going to be twice as cute when you shrink your subjects down to puppies.
Photographer Seth Casteel did it with Underwater Dogs and the sequel Underwater Puppies, and we are very happy to inform you that animal photographer Carli Davidson recently decided to take her viral SHAKE photos of dogs and create the photo series and book SHAKE Puppies.
High speed cameras that shoot thousands of frames per second are, in general, both big and expensive. But if you're looking for a much more portable and much more affordable option, and you don't mind trading in some resolution, the fps1000 might be the perfect 'poor man's' alternative.
You probably wouldn't think it, but capturing shapes in smoke is an incredibly difficult task. In fact, it took photographer Thomas Herbrich a full three months, over 100,000 photos and one dead camera to capture approximately 20 images he considered keepers for his Smoke series.
Who said you have to drop big bucks to have some high-speed fun? Well, it definitely wasn't Joey Shanks, who recently decided to show the Phantom users out there that they’re not the only ones who can do it.
To do this, Shanks rented a Casio EX-F1 high speed camera for a week. Costing him only $100, he combined its high frame-rate with a healthy dose of water and gunpowder to create some interesting high-speed footage with minimal investment.
Phantom, the company behind some insane high-speed cameras has announced their new flagship camera, the Phantom v2511. Bumping up the specs across the board from their current flagship device, this beast manages to pack in up to 25,600 frames per second at 1280 x 800 resolution (just over 720p).
So, you think carrying around your pro-series body and 300mm f/2.8 all day at a sporting event sucks? Well, don’t go complaining to the sports photographers of yesteryear or they might pull out a photo of them using the beast known as 'Big Bertha.'
About a month ago, the folks at DigitalRev TV launched a new series called "Speed Shooter" in which they show you how to take great high-speed shots of various subjects. We didn't get a chance to cover the first episode when it first came out, and so now that episode two has debuted we thought we'd put them together in one.
Photojojo comes from humble beginnings as a newsletter for the photography community, but it is a humble newsletter no more. Since those days, it has evolved into one of the go-to resources for the latest trendy gear, gadgets and accessories, and today, they announced their expansion into yet another market: rentals.
With the rise in popularity and drop in price of high speed cameras, more and more incredible footage is getting captured of events our human brain would otherwise be unable to see in such detail.
And today, we have yet another one of those events, the protagonist being a Goshawk and the victim being a water balloon baited with a piece of the soon-to-be-dinner that, we'll be honest, never stood a chance.
High resolution, super slow-motion video is usually reserved for movie studios or individuals with very deep pockets. Once the frame rate capabilities reach into the thousands, the price range often hits the tens of thousands.
Two MIT-trained engineers are looking to change all that, and with their new edgertronic super slow motion camera, they've done just that.
There are DIY projects that just about anybody can do -- for example, turning an old film canister into a flashlight -- and there are DIY projects that have a very specific "Y" in mind.
The ArnoSync High-Speed photography rig falls into the latter category. But even if you don't have the engineering prowess to build it yourself, it's still worth taking a look at what this home-brew rig can do.
Here's a cool project for those of you who enjoy shooting with both cameras and guns. Did you know that you can photograph a speeding bullet using only a sugar cube and no other light source? As it turns out you can, and Instructables user FPSoutback has the video to prove it.
“Ya wanna see Edgerton’s lab?”
Now, asking a photographer if he would like to see the workspace of the guy who made all those iconic stop-action images of impossibly fast-moving objects was like asking a short-order cook if he’d like to see where they invented the ham and cheese omelet.
There's just something about skateboarding that attracts photographers and videographers. Whether they're traveling the world photographing crazy tricks in exotic places, or shooting 1000 fps footage of tricks that haven't even been named, camera junkies are always finding new and interesting ways to capture the sport.
Sebastian Linda's newest video does just that. By using high-speed cameras, some creative camera movements and colored powder, he's managed to create a magical skateboarding world through the lens of his camera.
Still life photographer Peter Schafrick recently built a custom contraption he calls "The Spinster." It's a mostly wooden device that allows him to spin paint-covered objects around an axis, capturing colorful images of paint being flung outward by centrifugal force. The resulting series is titled "Toys."
There hasn't been a lot to report vis-à-vis of memory cards lately. With the exception of the occasional limited time price drop and creative idea (like the partitioned "Wise" CF Card from Amulet with its instant backup capabilities) the last few months have been somewhat silent.
Enter Toshiba and its new Exceria Pro series of SDHC cards that will offer "the world's fastest data write speeds," and we again have something to get excited about in the world of storage.
For his project titled "Iridient," Zurich, Switzerland-based photographer Fabian Oefner shot a series of beautiful high-speed photographs showing colorful soap bubbles bursting and disappearing into a cloud of tiny droplets.
You may remember Triggertrap from our coverage of it a little over a year ago. The iOS app, which has since made its way to Android as well, acted as a "jack of all trades" camera trigger that offered more than 12 different triggering options.
Several of those options -- such as the sound and motion triggers -- were geared towards high-speed photography, and a new update and flash adapter from the Triggertrap team are primed to take the app's high-speed photo capabilities to the next level.
Here's a little bit of entertainment and humor for your Tuesday afternoon. At a recent mixer they hosted for creative professionals in the ad industry, St. Louis, Missouri-based Bruton Stroube Studios set up a slow motion photo booth and let the party-goers go at it. The above video is a compilation of some of the coolest shots.
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.
Here's a tutorial on how to capture an exploding water balloon in the precise moment the balloon pops, while the water still holds the shape of a balloon. I didn’t want to invest any money in laser barriers or something similar, so I built a very simple mechanism. It doesn't give me perfect timing, but it produces acceptable results.
Last year we featured a CGI rendering of an exploding Polaroid One Step camera that makes for a nice wallpaper. Photographer Alan Sailer creates real photographs showing the same thing. Sailer drills a hole into each camera, fills the void with a firecracker, and then captures the resulting explosion with high-speed photography using a Nikon D90.
Over the past couple of years, German photographer Markus Reugels has attracted quite a bit of attention for his high-speed photographs of water drop splashes. His project, titled "Liquid Splashes", consists of split-second photos that make colorful splashes look like tiny glass sculptures hovering in the air above a mirror. In the video above, Reugels introduces himself and his work, and takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour showing how he goes about creating his beautiful photographs.
Back in June, a National Geographic crew was given the task of filming and photographing a cheetah running at full speed. While there are plenty of videos and photos out there showing this, the magazine wanted to track alongside the cheetah as it ran (rather than simply capture it from a fixed location). The short behind-the-scenes video above shows how they went about doing this.
You know that beastly Sigma 200-500mm that we've featured twice in the past two days? Turns out it's headed to the World Series to be used for some pretty ground-breaking imagery. A post today by Jakob Schiller over at Wired fills in some interesting details on what the lens will be used for.
What would you capture if you had a day off on a hot summer day with $300,000 worth of …
You know those amazing high speed photos and videos of bullets being shot through various objects? BMW Canada decided …
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.
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.
Cinematographer Jim Geduldick was lucky enough to be the first to test out …
This past Monday was the 182nd birthday of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who became famous for his high …
Here’s a camera shop promo that features the Nikon D4 filmed with a Phantom Gold high speed camera. It …
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.