High Speed Photography

High Speed Photography

What is it? 
High Speed Photography is the science of taking images of very fast moving subject material. This type of photography captures things which are normally invisible to the human eye. On one hand, high speed photography can be used to capture an apple falling into water capturing the splash of the water. However, there is also the high speed photography of which is almost created into a video to show the fast movement of a frame of images. 

History
In 1872, the former governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, hired Eadweard Muybridge for some photographic studies, of the movement of a race horse. After completing this study, Stanford then wanted a study of the horse at a gallop. Muybridge planned to take a series of photos on 15 June 1878 at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm. He placed numerous large glass-plate cameras in a line along the edge of the track. The path was lined with cloth sheets to reflect as much light as possible. He copied the images in the form of silhouettes onto a disc to be viewed in a machine he had invented, which he called a zoopraxiscope. This device was later regarded as an early movie projector, and the process as an intermediate stage toward motion pictures or cinematography. Here is the photography done by Muybridge with his zoopraxiscope in 1878. 

How is it done?
The main requirements in order to create high speed photography are:

• A sensitive sensor
• Good shuttering system
• Fast strobe light

You can't just point a lens at an object and hope your picture will turn out. There are two very important factors that determine how film is exposed to light:

• How much light enters through the lens

• The amount of time the film is exposed to light
  
  The device that works with the aperture and determines the second factor, how long the film is exposed to light, is called the shutter. The shutter is basically a curtain that opens and closes to expose the film to light. More specifically, it's the shutter speed -- the rate at which the shutter opens and closes -- that really affects the film's exposure.
  The first factor, the amount of light coming onto the film, is controlled by the camera's aperture, which is a circular opening that can expand or shrink in size. The aperture works when you need to let in more light, the circle becomes bigger; when you need to block out some light, the circle becomes smaller. Once this is the case the image can be shot showing the movement, and creating high speed photography. 

My high speed photography images

Me and my classmates set up the photography studio in our college in order to capture some high speed photographs. We used a big bowl of water, while dropping fruit in to the water in order to create movement. We then captured this movement with a Canon 600D, here are some of my images.