Snappy Snapshots
April 30th, 2009 by ComputerBob
When I was only 12 years old, my Uncle Dom gave me a German 35mm, split-frame camera, his photographic enlarger, and all of his photo equipment, chemicals, supplies, books and magazine. Over a period of several months, he taught me how to take photos, develop my own rolls of film and make enlargements of my photos.
I remember being fascinated back then by a high-speed flash photograph of a drop of milk splashing into a crown shape. A few weeks later, Uncle Dom gave me an electronic strobe that he had built himself, so that I could graduate from taking photos with slow, dangerous and expensive flash bulbs to using an instantaneous electronic flash. It was a huge contraption that needed a big L-shaped bracket to hold it and my camera together, with a separate sync cord to connect it to my camera’s external x-sync connector. It also required its own huge power supply box that prevented me from carrying it around or using it anywhere that didn’t have an electric outlet to plug it in. But it gave me my first taste of “freezing action” and I was amazed at it — and at Uncle Dom, for having created it.
And no, I was never able to replicate the cool milk droplet photo. My photos all showed some spilled milk on a table.
On a related note, scientists have just demonstrated the world’s fastest camera, which can take a photo in less than a half of a billionth of a second.
That’s almost fast enough to photograph the attention span of a typical 12-year-old boy.
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