Eyecandy: High Speed Photgraphy

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/exhibit-3.html' target='_blank'>http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/exhibit-3.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"High Speed, Splashes, Dripping water, Schlieren and Photoinstrumentation Photographs"</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/splash-781.jpg" /><br /><br />Cool. I would love to be able to take such photos, although I am guessing that the kind of equipment you need is higher end that the basic DSLR that I have. The Canon 10D can take 9 images at a time before having to buffer and I can never capture all 9 images as the perfectly crisp ones that you see here. Has anyone dabbled in high speed photography?

[Filip Norrgard]

I suppose that they used the same kind of videocamera that they use on Mythbusters to "shoot" these pictures, which is no ordinary camera in any sense (like a Canon 10D, for example).

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know what those high-speed-cameras cost? I'm guessing they start at 3000 $ or €, not knowing anything about their pricing range. ;) The one they use on Mythbusters looks small enough to be a webcam, but the price -- I suppose -- is on a whole other level....

[Jason Dunn]

Man, some of those pictures are CRAZY! I'd love to know if any of those would be possible with my D200. I suspect the real issue is setting up properly for focus, more so than just the issue of motor drive speed...

[cameron]

These shots break down into two variables - shutter speed (and conversely aperture) and shutter release timing.

Shutter speed is obviously critical, as you need the fastest possible to catch some of this action. The issue is that the faster you go, the larger the aperture has to be. This presents problems with depth of field, especially for the water shots (where you are looking across the water) as opposed to the bullet shots (where everything is on the same plane).

The second question is how do you know when to release the shutter. In my reading on this - it's less about rapid shooting than about timing. Even if you are shooting at 1/1000 sec at 10 shots a second, you are only going to capture 1/100 of the action. In most cases, the photographer has some sort of rig that times the shutter according to some other action, like firing the gun. I was reading recently about the water droplet shots where someone rigged a sound sensor to their shutter release. Once the water hit, the shutter fires and he captured the rebound.