OT: High speed cameras

robert123 · Apr 11, 2017

I'm doing a little research on high speed cameras. I'm looking for something to capture a bullet entry at a speed of up to 3400 ft/s, so a pretty high frame rate will be required. Quite a few years ago I messed with a high speed camera. I think it cost close to $100k at the time. Are there any decent ones available for reasonable prices now or do I need to look at renting?

Chip Chester · Apr 11, 2017

If you can hold out for another year, it'll probably be included in your phone.
Upcoming Samsung will do 1000fps. Not sure where they put it all, or what the resolution is, but dang.

Yet another new Galaxy S8 feature was uncovered that no iPhone can match – BGR

Chip

Conrad Hoffman · Apr 11, 2017

Sometimes the companies have demo equipment they'll sell. That was the only way we could afford one as we also needed really high frame rates. One warning- with really high frame rates you need a huge amount of light. If you happen to live on the sun, that would be almost enough. That's why many bullet studies are actually shadow-graphs on a bright background.

Might check with these people, formerly Olympus- i-SPEED 3 Series - Exceptional value from a proven player.

Johnny Larue · Apr 11, 2017

1st place to ALWAYS look for stuff...since your taxes paid for it anyways...is the GSA....gov surplus auction....a laboratory certainly has high speed cameras for sale....I didn't peruse the whole site but heres a link to have a lookski....I purchase cars here for super cheap and new too

https://gsaauctions.gov/gsaauctions/aucindx/

dgfoster · Apr 11, 2017

robert123 said:
I'm doing a little research on high speed cameras. I'm looking for something to capture a bullet entry at a speed of up to 3400 ft/s, so a pretty high frame rate will be required. Quite a few years ago I messed with a high speed camera. I think it cost close to $100k at the time. Are there any decent ones available for reasonable prices now or do I need to look at renting?

Just to get a handle on "pretty high" if your bullet is traveling 3400 feet per second and the bullet itself is maybe at most an inch long (unless we are talking very large caliber) and you want details of bullet entry as in a sort of 10 or so frame series as the bullet covers its own length on entry, you are talking something on the order of a frame rate of 400,000 frames per second. Sounds like an interesting challenge! You probably know that Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge - Wikipedia

solved his, at the time cutting edge,I high speed photograph problem using individual sequentially triggered cameras. Edgerton spents weeks getting a single-frame famous photo of a bullet passing through an apple.

Shooting the Apple | Iconic Photos

Please keep us updated on this project and or provide links to cameras currently available that might be useful for this purpose.

Denis

Kyle Smith · Apr 11, 2017

Conrad Hoffman said:
If you happen to live on the sun, that would be almost enough.

That is pretty accurate.

Also the file sizes get big fast. You'll need a pretty high frame/sec rate, I'd guess 200,000/sec. Our camera was $8000 used, 7 years ago and only does 2,000/sec. It can barely capture objects traveling at 300 ft./sec.

dgfoster · Apr 11, 2017

Kyle Smith said:
That is pretty accurate.

Also the file sizes get big fast. You'll need a pretty high frame/sec rate, I'd guess 200,000/sec. Our camera was $8000 used, 7 years ago and only does 2,000/sec. It can barely capture objects traveling at 300 ft./sec.

Yes, frame rate is half the eqation, triggering at the precise moment needed is also a challenge.

Denis

Johnny Larue · Apr 11, 2017

heres one for 2500...whats your budget and target fps?

Chronos slow mo camera makes 21, fps more affordable - SlashGear

James H Clark · Apr 11, 2017

I thought that strobes were the secret to high speed photos. Little did I know.

JH

bloomautomatic · Apr 11, 2017

It won't capture a bullet, but about 8 years ago I had a Casio EX-F1 point n shoot digital that would film at up to 1200fps at a relatively low resolution. As someone said, you need A LOT of light.

I took some interesting vids of pistols and rifles cycling. Very neat stuff. It was around $800 back then, still sells for around $500 on ebay now. The newer versions seem to top out at 1000fps and run about $300. Not bad for the price, but not professional grade.

Conrad Hoffman · Apr 11, 2017

Be very careful with older used cameras. You're going to be a slave to the software and firmware, so if the camera isn't supported, it could be an expensive doorstop quite quickly. Thus my suggestion of looking at demo equipment from the major players. They also rent, but that adds up quickly.

Scottl · Apr 11, 2017

Look up the work of Harold "Doc" Edgerton. He used strobe lamps in a darkened room with an open shutter for his studies. As I recall he used a microphone at some distance from the muzzle to trigger the strobe.

Among his most famous photos were a bullet splitting a playing card and another piercing an apple.

David Merrill · Apr 11, 2017

Fun stuff. multiple strobes - Google Search

Mostly requires deep pockets and electronic instrumentation expertise. However I once made the rounds of old school camera shops in a large city for my employer and purchased every old Graflex (IIRC) available. They were set up open shutter in a darkened firing range with a multiple microflash strobe and suitable triggering and synchronizing circuitry to obtain multiple images of projectile impacts.

David Merrill

9100 · Apr 11, 2017

A few years ago a couple of us rigged up an Edgerton surface flash. It used a quartz tube with electrodes at each end. The flash was on the outside in the air. As best I recall, we charged a capacitor with a neon sign transformer and triggered it with some kind of pulse. We looked at it with a phototransistor and got very short spikes on an oscilloscope. This was all haywired together with no attempt at calibration, so I don't know whether it would help here or not. The person who initiated the experiment liked to reproduce things like that and lost interest once he got it to work. He is still a frequent visitor so I can get more information if you wish. It was a cheap experiment, done entirely with items we had already.

Bill

dgfoster · Apr 11, 2017

And to "stop the speeding bullet" flash durations on the order of 1/1,000,000 second will be required. He will need a high flash intensity. Unfortunately intensity of flash for a given flash unit is directly related to duration, so high intensity is coupled to longer duration flash. To get high intensity and short duration requires a very high power flash unit. And then there are latency issues---timing of actual light output after the signal to flash is given.

This is not a simple problem.

Edgerton is the father of modern flash units seen on every camera since flash bulbs became obsolete. He did Dept. of War work during WWII designing flash units that filled a bomber with capacitors and batteries so that the ground could be illuminated from altitude. An amazing guy. Saw a presentation 20 yrs ago in Seattle in a small setting put on by his son in which his sone demo'd equipment his father designed and used.

https://www.wired.com/2010/04/0406harold-edgerton-high-speed-photography/

Denis

adamm · Apr 11, 2017

I speced out, and my employer bought, a high speed camera about 10 years ago. At the time, Vision Research had the best combination of capability and price that I could find. We ended up with a Miro series camera. We rented a while before committing to the purchase. If I were to buy another, they would be the first place I'd look. I don't know if another competitor has cropped up since. At the time, the software was good to use, and the system worked well.

Phantom High Speed Cameras | Super Slow Motion Cameras

robert123 · Apr 11, 2017

Thanks for the ideas. I'll check out some of these options. We would primarily be trying to see the orientation of the bullet at entry, so a large number of frames at the entry point is not required. I think at least 6000-10000 fps would be sufficient though we might learn more with a higher frame rate. The largest bullet size would be 20mm.

bryan_machine · Apr 11, 2017

Grovel around the youtube videos of the following people (some of whom deal with bullets) and see what cameras they are using (you may have to go grove their patreon pages where they announce what they bought, or find a video where they compare them.)
1. Hydraulic Press Channel = hydraulic press channel - YouTube
2. Forgotten Weapons = Forgotten Weapons
- YouTube

The Slow Mo Guys are mostly known for using a Phantom (big $$$$ camera), but worth digging
3. The Slow Mo Guys - Inside a Camera at 1,fps - The Slow Mo Guys - YouTube

David Merrill · Apr 11, 2017

Here is a little more boost up the learning curve: Search - RIT
Search on 'high speed photography' and on 'high speed digital photography'
Some example results: High Speed Photography
https://people.rit.edu/andpph/text-hs-overview.html
Scroll to the end of the latter for a list of equipment suppliers.

Note that having successfully obtained the desired image results, the usual next step is to somehow derive some numerical data points. Images have the added advantage of revealing what else may be happening in the vicinity of the subject.

David Merrill

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OT: High speed cameras

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