High Speed Photography

Want to take photos of balloons bursting, party poppers popping or water drops in mid drop? It’s all possible with a technique referred to as high speed flash.

Balloon bursting Balloon with small amount of flour added and triggered with Nero Trigger

Your camera may have an action stopping shutter speed of 1/8000sec, but often there’s not enough light to allow this sort of speed so the preferred option is flash. The camera can be set to the flash shutter speed of 1/125sec and the flash provides the action stopping speed by illuminating the subject at its flash duration which can be anything up from 1/500sec. Many go into the 1/20000sec area. The subject is illuminated in this quick burst which ensures it’s frozen in motion.

But there’s a bigger problem. How do you ensure that the moment you fire the shutter is the perfect moment. You can with either luck or incredibly good timing. Or better still take the guess work out and use a device that triggers the shutter at the precise moment required.

Such devices, known as triggers use sound, light or laser beam splitting to detect the trigger moment. They attach to the camera’s remote release socket using a dedicated cable. Some cameras have a simple 2.5mm jack others are more complex electronic connectors. The remote trigger will usually have cables to suit most popular camera fittings from Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Pentax, Sony, Minolta, Panasonic, etc.

If you want to photograph a balloon bursting you’d probably switch to the sound detector. The trigger has a microphone that senses the noise of the balloon pop and fires the camera instantaneously*.

Photographing a drop of water from a tap would require the laser beam splitter mode and would fire the trigger when the beam was split.*

You would use the light sensor to record a streak of Lightning. The trigger would fire when it detected a change in ambient light levels.*

* the exact moment the shutter fires can be adjusted in milliseconds so the trigger can fire slightly after the detection of change. This means you can allow for various delays that may occur.

The devices available range from very simple triggers to highly advanced.

Products available include:
Nero Trigger
Sabre Switch Triggersmart Motion Capture System
AEO Photo produce the Lightning Strike
The Time Machine
PhotoTrigger

 

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