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Exhibition of High Speed Photography 143

Posted by michael from the phun-with-photogates dept.
Dantastic writes: "If high-speed projectiles, breaking glass, and hot plates sound like fun, check out this site." No news here, just some really nice photographs. I didn't realize a tennis ball deformed that much.
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Exhibition of High Speed Photography More

Exhibition of High Speed Photography

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  • Nope no news, some of the pics are kinda interesting though. Take a look in your spare time. --MonMotha

  • This [pacsci.org] would have helped so much the first time my physics teacher went on about modal forms in the waves of a single string..... oh well....

    One of my Physics texts had the lovely bullet-through-a-playing-card shot.... always my favourite

  • *sigh* (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by zpengo ( 99887 )
    No news here, just some really nice photographs.

    Ah, geez, there goes the neighborhood.

    • Re:*sigh* (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Use PHP and maybe you'll get some help.
  • Nah...looks more like highspeed /. effect to me....

  • Harold Edgerton (Score:5, Informative)

    by rackrent ( 160690 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @11:29PM (#2233528)
    What always impresses me about these pictures is remembering the guy, Harold Edgerton [edgerton.org], who came up with this technology as well as side scan sonar [kleinsonar.com]. What a guy.

  • In case it gets totally slashdotted. (Score:4, Informative)

    by helixblue ( 231601 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @11:30PM (#2233533) Homepage
    I made a hopefully complete mirror of the subdirectory at:

    http://profile.sh/high_speed_photos/ [profile.sh]

    I've only got 50K/s outgoing, so I'm sure I'll get slashdotted too.. but it will at least give *some* people a chance.

    • Yes, it did. In short order.
      Thank you!
    • The article's only been up a short time and already the original site is offline. Did the site owner know about the impending slashdotting? Even caching (ala Google) the page being linked to would probably make a huge difference for bandwidth challenged sites.

      Xix.
    • Nice...it occured to me to do the same after having a look at your mirror, but it seems like your site is holding up well. Are you running it yourself? How's things look at your end?
      • Seems to be holding up, the cable modem bandwidth is the restriction, not the box. It's my lonely home server Athlon 900 running on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT. Just static pages on Apache 1.3.20 so it aint no thang.

        Luckilly it's not the old pentium box.. Good thing I needed something to do with the Athlon when I moved to MacOS X for my desktop.

        Oh, and to the other poster who mentioned the 'do not copy' thing. I laughed my ass off when I saw that while I wget'd the site.. I just said "eh, go ahead and sue be for saving your poor box". It'll make a nice slashdot story if I do get sued, and then the box will be slashdotted all over again, and I'll mirror it again, and the cycle will be cyclic.

        • I don't remember all the details, cause I try to follow both american and european legislations on the subject.
          I remember reading of restriction to copy restriction for ISP for technical reasons.
          As you Provide a Service on Internet, I think you should be entitled to an ISP status, as long as the you don't cache any more after the disparition of the technical reason (the slashdotting).
          Of course IANAL
        • An Athlon? Wow...My main box, the one I'm typing this on, is a 90MHz Pentium, and the server I would have put it on is a 200MHz Pentium. I keep forgetting that just 'cos I've got castoffs doesn't mean everyone else does :-). Not that I'm complaining; they both do just about everything I want them to. But I am curious to see how the 200 would stand up to a slashdotting, or some small part of it. It's got lots of bandwidth, and it's running 1.3.20; the only restrictions are the speed and memory (48mb).

          Hope you don't get sued!

  • "Failure of high tech journalism", talking about various reasons and ways in which news sites just don't get it. Followed up by pictures of stuff exploding, deforming, and shattering. Way to show 'um their wrong, guys. :)
  • ... a server being slashdotted?

    The bubble looks cool. Is it hi-res?

  • The three images of the racquetball, especially the last donut shaped image was great.

    • I agree, I liked the raquetball one the best too. I'll have an entirely new perspective while I'm playing raquetball now :).

      I wonder if the people who design raquetballs and tennisballs know that they're going to be deformed that much and design them accordingly, I would hope so, but ya never know.

  • Beautiful. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by blang ( 450736 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @11:42PM (#2233568)
    Especially the leaping milk drops. They look like a bunch of tall skinny people. This must be the perfect science project for kids, and for once the results are something that's good enough to frame and put on a wall. And it also teaches that things are not always what they seem, and there's beauty in the details. And (stretching or contracting) time changes everything.

  • This is really quite easy (Score:3, Informative)

    by ravett ( 238588 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @11:46PM (#2233576)
    I actually took the high speed photography course that these pictures came from while I was in high school (North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics).

    It's really amazing how easy taking most of these pictures is. All you need is a camera that can be held open indefinitely, a flash unit that can be triggered externally, and a whole bunch of black cloth. That and a soldering iron :)

    Unfortunately my work wasn't cool enough to make the show. I guess Dr. Winters didn't like apples being hit by arrows. It makes lots of apple sauce really fast though...
    • I did some ripoffs of the the famous photo of Picasso in which he seems to be painting with a torch and standing still. Exact same method (I used a flashlight to paint, though).

      You leave the shutter on bulb, wave the flashlight around, stop and stand still, and someone deploys the flash. It sure amazed the kids at school when I showed them.

      bart
    • The newest photograph I saw was 1995... Maybe your photograph was newer? I know Dr Winters has a lot of cooler photographs than were shown on this site.
      (BTW, I've seen your arrow-through-apple photo; cool to see another NCSSM alum!)
    • Hey cool... another S&M alum. What year? I TA'd for Dr. Winter's course in HSI last fall. Cool stuff. He's got all kinds of new toys. We've moved to an all-digital environment, but still use the old computers for timing. He has a new flash, with a 250ns flash time, and he briefly had a high speed video camera (don't remember specs). He's also been playing with a .22 rifle for projectiles (got tired of the old pellet gun, I guess). Check out hiviz.com (was that there when you did stuff?) and also links of the ncssm page. I don't know where exactly.
  • I especially like the racquetball here--nice final taurus; how apropos for the CG-types!!!

    I once saw a very nice picture of a jet figher with a shockwave behind it (sonic boom?)...another nice (vapor) taurus. Anybody know of a link to that one?

  • I didn't realize a tennis ball deformed that much.
    I just read today that Venus Williams hits her serves at 127 mph (which becomes obvious when you watch her opponents try to return them). It would be kinda neat to get a shot like the one of this site of one of her cannon blasts.
    • I think you have an interesting subject there for a photo of this sort. However, maybe pictures of parts of Venus herself as she uncorks her 127 MPH serves would be much more interesting that pics of the balls skidding off the clay/hardcourt/grass.
    • Was just thinking the same thing. The dude in the pic is using an old warped wooden racquet. I'll go out on a limb here and say a pro serve looks more like the racquetball :)
    • As impressive as the Williams sisters serves are, the fastest serving guys are hitting 143+ mph on their serves. Yipes. I can tell you from first hand experience, returning anything over 100mph is really tough to do. If they place it right, you don't have a chance.


      Of course, nothing compares to jai-alai players who can chuck the ball at 180+mph and are periodically killed when they misjudge a catch.

  • An air gun made of PVC pipe was used under closely-controlled conditions in a laboratory to accelerate the potato slices without endangering the experimenters.

    It WASN'T a potato gun, that's for sure. Those things are DANGEROUS!!! We're SCIENTISTS, not high school kids! Geez you guys.
  • "No news here, just some really nice photographs."

    From Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. to Slashdot: Photographs for Nerds. Stuff that deform.

  • High speed photos of nuclear blasts (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    These are a hoot ...

    http://www.vce.com/Rapatronic/rapa.html

    http://www.fas.org/nuke/hew/Usa/Tests/Upshotk.ht ml

  • I especially like... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Nathdot ( 465087 ) on Thursday August 30, 2001 @12:13AM (#2233650)
    ...the instantaneous freeze frame of "Lighting A Fart"

    I guess they did that one after a few drinks at the lab on a Friday afternoon

    :)
  • An air gun made of PVC pipe was used under closely-controlled conditions in a laboratory to accelerate the potato slices without endangering the experimenters

    Nothing like what a little pvc, hairspray, and an electronic ignition from the family bbq can do to advance the development of the "Tuber-Like Airfoils" division of Boeing.
  • It's really amazing to see the dates on some of these photos (1990, 1995, etc.). And the fact that these kids were in high school, or just getting into high school when they shot these. I am amazed at their patience in getting these shots, since if you think about it, they didn't get these things "by chance" or "on the first shot." These took a ton of time setting up, researching, and staging, to get them all this good. The milk dropping on the glass has to be my favorite. So much order in a chaotic event... Hmm. Jurassic Park anyone??
  • For a moment there, I read it as 'Exhibition of High Speed Pornography' and went 'What The Fuck?'
    I'm OK now. Really.
    Just me and the lack of caffine in me this morning.
  • Looks like the site is /.'ed pretty good, but I did manage to pull all the files off the other mirror (before it got /.'ed too) and got them onto a server with some more/redundant bandwidth.

    http://hsphotos.wingnet.net/ [wingnet.net]

    Hopefully this will give more people the opportunity to see it, and will relieve the other guy's bandwidth a bit... (and probably kill ours in the process... LOL)

  • Come on, thats a redneck party trick, not physics. Real men dont need gloves for it.


    siri

  • It's not hard to make things like this (Score:4, Informative)

    by tap ( 18562 ) on Thursday August 30, 2001 @01:01AM (#2233728) Homepage
    You don't need special equipment, just a camera with a flash. It does help to have a SLR though. I did this back in HS for my final project in photography class. I had a water baloon exploding, a hatchet smashing a lightbulb, milk drop in a bowl, and a ice cube splashing into a glass.

    The hardest part was figuring out how to trigger the events remotely, since I didn't have a helper. I just needed to take a dozen pictures of each thing to get a few that turned out well. I would take one that was early, like an ice cube just above the glass, and then a better one where the ice cube was in the glass and water was splashing out to make a sequence. You can't tell that it's not the same ice cube.

  • Another mirror is here [ipal.org], at least for a while. You can also get the tarball [1058816 bytes gzipped to 893547 bytes] here [ipal.org] if you want to jumpstart your own mirror.

    • slashdot should automatically mirror every url it points too.

    • The original site appears to be up and operating fine, so I took my mirror back down. The link now redirects to the original site. 90 unique IPs accessed the mirror site, so unless the original site was way wimpy, the mirror didn't help divert /. effect load, although it probably did let 90 more people see the site without having to wait.

  • the footage craig kilbourn plays over and over of the bird flying through the fastball and exploding... anyone see that? cool in a gross-out sort of way.

  • Digital High Speed Photography (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ryanisflyboy ( 202507 ) on Thursday August 30, 2001 @01:44AM (#2233789) Homepage Journal
    I used to work for a studio that did high-speed film work for ejection seat testing. One day the film crew got a hold of a digital camera that was able to do high speed video. I didn't ever learn a lot about it but it couldn't produce a full frame of video (768x512??) because the chip and the processing unit couldn't store information fast enough. It was also in black and white. Even with it's limitations we had a blast with that thing. We dropped nails, lit a match, broke a light bulb. Just about anything that we thought would look cool in slo-mo we did. Doing it the old way (as this studio still does) requires film processing and then transfer to video. It's basically a pain in the butt. So there is a lot of intrest in the high-speed community for a digital camera that can produce full frame video in color. Does anyone know what kinds of technology would be requried to make something like that possible? What if the 'gigapixel' cameras in the future had a 'slow-mo' mode? Imagine all the fun we could have!

  • For a minute there I thought the title of the article was "Exhibition of High Speed Pornography".

    Everybody just fast-forwards though the boring parts anyway, errrr... ummmm... or so I've heard.
  • the video to Freak on a Leash. That was a cool vid.
  • most of these pics were taken in the mid 1990's as i can see, but today shooting those pics is much easier. just connect a (very good) digital camera to a pc which is connected to a trigger, might be a touch sensitive plate, a laser beam or a cute, red "don't panic"-button you smash with your hand. unfortunatly i don't have the equipment, but shooting such photos must be an interesting thing
  • I just woke up five minutes ago, and I parsed this as "High Speed Pornography", and noticed the "nice pictures" comment. ugh.
  • ...where's the high speed photo of the dork submitting a First Post?

  • Just an example... I saw a documentary on the making of Hot Shots (Charlie Sheen). Remember the sceen where Sadam Hussien is frozen, knocked over, and his frozen brittle body smashes into tiny pieces? The filmmakers first tried regular video cameras, but the scattering of the fragmented pieces could not be seen because the action was too quick. They turned to high speed video photography to capture more images of the action then slowed it down. The result was quite impressive.
  • A few days ago my girlfriend showed me an on-line exhibition [loc.gov] of photographs made from 1905 to 1915 by Prokudin-Gorskii at the Library of Congress. What is interesting is that these photos not only beautyful, but in color. As you may recall, color photography didn't emerge for some time later. This individual would take three pictures of his target, one with a red filter, one with a green filter, and one with a blue filter. Then he would show these pictures via a home-grown slide show projector made from stacking three projectors on top of each other and focusing them on the same location on the wall. There is a really nice description [loc.gov] as to how they made color composite images (now available as JPG and TIFF). Very pretty pictures. Even more amazing when you consider the time period they were made in. If you look closely, some of the images are slightly blurred, for instance in this picture [loc.gov] the target's left foot must have moved slightly between the three pictures. Enjoy!

  • Racketball (Score:2, Funny)

    by AJSchu ( 23730 )

    Screw a racketball hitting a wall, I want to see what it looks like when it hits someone in the face. It's happened to me enough that I...oh, nevermind.

    AJS

  • When I first read the headline, I thought it said high speed pornography. I saw a link to pictures, and the phrase "I didn't realize a tennis ball deformed that much".


    Had me wondering for a second...

  • It seems made of wood, reminds me of the good old eighties when you had tennis elbow with these ones.
  • Harold Edgarton, the inventor of the electric flash, is the father of this sort of photography. If you like this post, you'll LOVE this book [mit.edu].
  • Available here [hiviz.com]. I particularly like the cornstarch balloons.

  • Taken with SpeedCam [weinbergervision.com]:

  • I was taking the High Speed Photography course there and it was one of the last years that Doc was roaming the halls, since Dr. Miller was by then teaching the course.

    I had lunch with him one day, and he talked me into buying a large re-print of the 30-06 bullet blowing through the apple. The deal was, if I bought it, he would autograph it. One of my most cherished possessions.

    If any of you remember the early advertisement for Kevlar showing the bullet bouncing off the Kevlar mesh, that was me and my team! Usually, I took photos, movies, and high-speed video (Instar, Kodak) of yarn processes and Mylar film processes.

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