Review of the MIT High Speed Photography Short Course
Last week, in addition to being introduced to the Miracle of Science Bar and Grill*, I had the opportunity to attend the professional short course from MIT’s Edgerton Center, High-Speed Imaging for Motion Analysis: Systems and Techniques.
Below are a few of the images captured during the course, during the bullet lab. It consisted of taking still images with a 500 nanosecond strobe of (what else?) .22 bullets going through things. These were taken in a dark room with the camera shutter open, and a microphone trigger for the strobe. I re-hosted these and others in the general photography section of this site and in addition you can find them on the Edgerton Center Site, along with others from previous years.
The course was great, split about 50-50 between lectures and laboratory work, starting with the basics of high speed photography and touching on some of the most advanced technologies that are just being released commercially. In the four days of the class we covered a wide range of useful topics:
- Camera and Setting Selection
- Lighting
- Lens Selection
- Laser Illumination
- Schlieren Imaging
- Motion Analysis Software
The 32+ course attendees were split into four groups and assigned a rather tongue in cheek project to be presented at the dinner the final evening of the course. This was a competition between teams, with prizes for the team with the “best” presentation. The point was to demonstrate some of the principles that were learned in the class, but also included points awarded for originality and entertainment. I won’t divulge details of what happened, but these were some of the funniest presentations I have ever seen. For some reason there were quite a few high speed video clips of people being hit in the head with things (including hot dogs and balls of clay). My group didn’t win the competition, but I must admit that the team that won earned every bit of it.
So many thanks to Dr. Jim Bales for the great course and the chance to have a little fun while we were at it!
* The Miracle of Science is a bar and grill about 3 blocks from MIT. Very much a tech college decor, the menu is nicely done as a periodic table on a chalkboard (I had the Rony Burger, chemical symbol “Rb”), and the bar and tables are the black lab surfaces that we all remember from chemistry lab.
