Today we take a look at a printer my daughter tossed off of a concrete wall.
Materials
A dead printer, copier, scanner thingy.
Procedure
If you have a youngin’ you can skip the following steps….actually we’ll skip those steps entirely as I don’t feel up to writing a biology lesson. Have your youngin’ climb up to the top of the concrete wall, pass up the printer and give them the command they’ve been waiting for their entire lives. “Go ahead, toss that printer off the wall!”
Result
In short, a mess. It is interesting to see how the printer obliterates itself. If anyone had any doubts about the validity of gravity I hope this video puts their mind at ease that it is indeed still functioning to spec. The glass was obviously broken in previous attempts, as were parts of the printer, which made this one such an interesting shot. This was the third time we had dropped it. I have to say that Epson makes very sturdy printer, the first time we dropped it not a single thing broke. An eight foot fall and nothing broke. Amazing for a heavy, plastic printer like that. Anyway, enjoy the destruction.
Today we look at a large lightbulb being rather unceremoniously smashed against a wall.
Materials
A large dead light bulb.
Procedure
First determine your distance from the wall, A. The force at which you know you can throw, B. Then take the circumference of the earth minus A, and throw that away, it is quite useless. Then take B and go ahead and chunk that too, you won’t be needing it here. Then figure in the wind speed and gravity (9.8m/s/s in most places, your gravity may be different, please inquire at your local post office). Take all of these things and write them down on a large brown piece of paper. You won’t be needing them again. Now toss the bulb at the wall.
Result
A rather large and somewhat unsafe explosion of lots of tiny pieces of glass that can get lodged in your eye if you don’t have safety glasses on. If you do have safety glasses on, congrats you are now safely protected on a very very small portion of your body. In all seriousness this is a neat shot that I rather enjoy, one piece of glass becoming many. Mechanical reproduction at its…um….finest.
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.
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 close up of a shot we had filmed a few months ago.
Materials
Right around 1/4 gallon of gasoline.
A video appropriately titled “Fire and things not to do with it because you might lose all the hair, and skin, on your body.”
Procedure
Let’s not and say we did.
Result
This close up shot allows us to take a little closer look at the previous video, giving us some more detail to work with. This video shows the point where the gasoline has completed its burn and is now turning to smoke. This is a great look at one of the things I think is prettiest about this shot. The fire itself is pretty, the smoke is as well, but both of them together make for that classic fireball we all know and love as made popular by countless action flicks. I especially like the way the smoke takes the light, it really gives you a feel of how dense the smoke actually is.
Today we take a look at a bunch of paint balls impacting a wall.
Materials
Paintball gun (Provided by Advanced Tronics in Waycross, GA)
Paintballs
Observations
This was a rapid fire paint ball gun that would belt out the paint balls at a pretty decent clip. The force these things hit with was rather amazing, it was actually taking the paint off of the wall. One of the things I like about this particular shot is the way each ball pushes the remaining paint around. This is a good one to still frame through, there are several really interesting hits.
Today we take a look at another water splash made possible by a canister of compressed air.
Materials
Water, pan, air can.
Observations
This is a fun shot. I like the way the splash forms from the blast of air. I kind of wish I had filmed this from the front. There really isn’t much more that I can say about this piece. The splash is pretty, the drops are pretty, enjoy?
Additional Notes
This note is almost unrelated to this post. Today I shipped back the SVSi GigaView camera and a sad farewell it was. This was a really fun camera to use and I will miss having it around. It was quick to setup and nice to film with, very little fuss. The customer service was excellent, the people were fun to talk to and very knowledgeable. It was a great camera to work with and I look forward to seeing more from this company, I think they have a bright future in the high-speed industry.
