High Speed Photography

Fascinated from pictures on the internet I decided to build a high-speed photography rig on the cheap.

The whole thing costed less than £5 and it's pretty functional.

I calculated the time a water drop should take to hit the ground by falling from 1 meter of distance. Accordingly to my calculations it should be around 102ms in the void. Now here we got air and weight counts too...but I'm going to figure the exact time by trial and fail. So in the end it should be slightly more than 102ms but not too much anyway I would guess.

I built some circuitry and interfaced it with my Arduino, the whole thing should be able to track when the laser gets crossed by the water drop, immediately cut off the power of the laser (so it's light won't interfere with the picture) and put the camera in focus status, wait for the water drop to be in position (with a short timer) and shoot.

The script is almost completed; just need to regulate the light sensor and interface the whole thing with the laser. Can't wait :)

I used an UV filter to protect the lenses from water spillage but also to reduce light reflections from the water, have got a new one as I "destroyed" the previous one for my macro flash ring (still waiting on leds to complete that one...could be sort of useful for this thing too now ).

Here's some pictures so far :)

The setup I used:

On a side note I found a microwave oven in the trash and I'm scavenging it for spare parts, will probably build a Jacob's Ladder and picture it in different ways (should be interesting enough...and fun too).