Today we have yet another death of a water balloon. In this particular situation, the balloon was in a gold fish bowl.

Materials
A goldfish bowl.
A water balloon, blue.

Observation
This is an interesting shot. Primarily because the water is contained and cannot escape in the normal manner by which water likes to escape. The water, not being aware that it was trapped in a goldfish bowl, still tries to escape to no avail. Having failed to notice that it failed to escape the water continues about its business of playing with gravity in a not entirely unpleasing manner. The bubbles are neat too.

Original Video

Today we have something a little different and a little special. Yesterday Rick Burmeister from MCT dropped by for a few hours to show me some of the new toys they have. We took a look at the new Photron SA-1 high-speed camera. Let me start by saying I was incredibly impressed with this camera. The image quality was wonderful in the two lighting situations we tested it in. The light sensitivity is really amazing. With these cameras you need as much light sensitivity as you can get, especially considering this camera will run at 5400fps at its full resolution of 1024×1024. This makes for a monster. Now on to the subject of the delay for todays post.

One of the really neat features that Rick showed me was the the ability to shift the visible bits from the 12bit image the SA-1 captures. What this allows you to do is adjust the brightness of the image, shifting to the darker bits allows you to capture detail that would have ordinarily blown out and shifting the other direction allows you to bring out the details that were in shadow and normally muddy. This is a useful feature when you are filming anything that has the potential to blow out to ranges that are normally incomprehensible, rocket engines, explosions etc. All while maintaining the other items in the scene. In the software you are only able to view and export these. This brings me to the topic of HDR (High Dynamic Range) Imaging. HDR is excellently defined (with samples) here. Unfortunately, the ability to capture motion with HDR was all but impossible with current digital high-speed cameras. The SA-1 opens the doors just a crack for us. After exporting three different versions of the same footage using the bit shifter, I started on the process of figuring out how to do this with video. After several hours of searching and experimenting I was unable to figure out how to get video sequences processed into a tone mapped image sequence. There were not any tools I could find that would make the process simple or even feasible so I contacted a few of my friends and started the process rolling to either find or make something that would do it. Chad Boyda was able to cobble together a basic setup that would allow for the batch processing of the thousands of frames the SA-1 kicks out through a HDR application, FDR Tools. The process we worked out is clunky, slow and results in a bit of strobe in the video, but the resulting image has far more detail than is normally available. Future versions of the tool should negate that strobe. Now just to disclaim, the source images are not precisely what one would get shooting with a bracketed f-stop so the process does not yield quite the same results, but it is closer than normal.

I’ve included the original video as well as three images that represent the three different videos that were processed to produce the final shown above.

This is a shot of water pouring off of my roof into a puddle.

Materials
Fan type sprinkler.

Procedure
Direct the spray so it is hitting your roof fairly high up and allow it to drip down.

Observations
I like the splashes, they seem to form a countless number of different but similar shapes. The drops themselves are similar in that manner as well, all different but you can see the same basic principles at work. The ripples are also interesting to observe. I like the ferns and the movement from the water striking their leaves.