It’s Friday! That means its time for the weekly Friday Educational blog posting!
This weeks topic is SPEED. I thought I would touch on a few things, one being high speed photography. I guess you could consider high speed photography to be the opposite of time lapse photography. It involves capturing images of very fast phenomena, not “speed” itself. An incredible example is an image of a nuclear explosion just a millisecond after detonation!
(Nuclear explosion photographed by Rapatronic camera less than 1 millisecond after detonation. The fireball is about 20 meters in diameter. The spikes at the bottom of the fireball are due to what is known as the rope trick effect.)
photo source: Wikipedia
What you do with you camera’s setting dictates the image you will capture. Do you want your subject tack sharp, or blurry? How do you show “speed” in a photograph? It all comes down to Shutter Speed. The faster a subject is moving, the faster the shutter speed you need for a sharp image. But, (yes, there is a “but), it’s not the speed of the subject that determines blur. It’s how far the subject moves while the exposure is being made.
This depends not just on the subject’s actual speed, but also on the direction of its movement, its distance from the camera, and the focal length of the lens. Make sense? (photo credit: Shortcourses.com)
And then there’s my version of “Speed”. Early morning, pre sunrise, highway driving, “got to get to the mountains before the sun comes up”…. speed. This image was captured with my “Pudding Camera” app on my Droid phone.
Speeding just a little, but not a lot. Got to stay safe!
