High-speed photography offers an amazing glimpse at what can be produced when you simply slow down the world. Natural motion, such as frogs jumping, can look captivatingly beautiful when shot at thousands of frames per second, and can make nature shows amazing to view. Destruction also looks superb when slowed down, with shows such as Mythbusters frequently making use of ths technique.

Coffee being blown out of a straw as captured by a high-speed camera

The actual technology behind high-speed photography and cameras is quite amazing. A normal everyday-Joe camera usually records at 30 or perhaps 60 frames per second (FPS), meaning that the shutter must activate 30-60 times every second. However with a high-speed camera, the shutter must move much faster to achieve speeds of over 1,000 frames per second; a fairly common frame rate for slow-motion videos.

Cameras don’t stop just at 1,000 frames per second though, they can continue upwards into millions and millions of frames per second at lowered resolutions. In fact, the supposedly “fastest” high-speed camera in the world can record at 200,000,000 (200 million) frames per second, making “even the fastest moving objects look like they are standing still.” Of course the image quality from this camera would not be very good, even though it demanded a $457,000 price tag.

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