Photography Gear News

Mark Rober is no stranger to bullet time rigs, in fact he is the smarts behind this clever rotating bullet time rig that we featured a while back. But this time he is taking it to the next step - onto 20,000 frames per second.

"On our last post we built and used a sound trigger to shoot a crossbow shoots an egg, today we add a photo gate trigger and shoot things falling.

After using the original trigger circuits for quite a while, I decided to make some improvements and to amalgamate the various devices into one, and to finally "hard wire" the whole lot. My excuse was that while I was incorporating the improvements I could rationalize the kit, but to be honest this was a bit of a vanity project. The finished control box is better, and much more versatile, and has enough knobs and switches to impress the unwary, but functionally the quick-and-easy separate circuits are just as good!

So, you can treat this post as a bit of a vanity project too, and skip it completely unless you are a inveterate tinkerer yourself!"

"High Speed Photography may seem intimidating with all the high end Arduino Triggers and crazy setups that are going around.

If you just want to have a quick stub at high speed photography, your best chance is probably selecting a subject that is easy to shoot (pun intended) in the dark, and light it using a strobe. "How will the strobe know when to pop?" you ask. Easy, using a contact sensor. Such subjects include thing that you can blow up relatively slowly using an arrow or a slow moving pellet, like balloon, eggs and Christmas ornaments.

A contact sensor is one of the most primitive and easy to build high speed photography sensors and is basically build from two conductive surfaces each connected to one of the strobes contacts. When those two surfaces meet they short the circuit and pop the flash.

This is how the picture in the top of the post (by Henrik Vento) was taken, an arrow hits a contact trigger after passing through the egg and a burst of light is made.

The nice thing about contact trigger is that is very (very) easy to build (about 10 minutes of work and 2 pennies worth of equipment. That is including the two pennies you are going to use as materials."

German photographer Markus Reugels has gained quite a bit of attention over the years for his stunning and colorful high-speed photographs of the shapes and forms created when liquid is dropped into water.

"On our last post we saw what high speed triggers are available, on this post we will build our first trigger and and take the very first high speed photo.

I started doing high-speed photography after being wowed by images I saw on the Filckr. Images made by hobbyists like me. As a very experimental (purely for fun) activity, I wasn't about to commit large amounts of money to it."