Sorry, this isn't the Glass 'n Flash Garage Sale post that I promised. I am traveling this evening for an early morning assignment, so I'll do that tonight from my hotel room. This is just a little quickie for those who might be interested in playing with their flashes as a motion-stopping toy. It was flipped to me by a Flickr user (Thanks, Amery!)
"Make Magazine," a cool little DIY-oriented periodical, had a piece in '04 on how to make your own high-speed flash trigger a la MIT's famous Harold "Doc" Edgerton, who did all of those time-stopping photos of a bullet piercing a playing card, droplets of milk, etc.
There is also a company that sells the little electronic flash controller for $100US, if you want to play but are not quite geek enough to build your own.
This is ideal for stopping time during one-time events, such as a drop of water making a splash, or a balloon popping.
For continuous actions (such as water from a low-flow faucet mixing with air as seen at left) you can simply shoot it with your off camera flash and get neat stuff, too.Remember to use your flash on manual - on the lowest possible setting - to get the shortest flash duration possible. A couple of 10,000ths of a second matter when you are stopping motion.
For this photo, I just had the flash sitting on the edge of the sink at 1/64th power. I was playing with it for a story I am doing on how to conserve energy to beat rising electricity costs in the Baltimore region.
(The top photo is from the flash kit website.)
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