Freezing Time

On Thanksgiving morning, my sons Mike and David set up a sound-activated flash trigger and invited me to use my camera to capture one of the angles of a light bulb breaking.  It was a significant transformation for that common household item.  A fraction of a second before hitting the ground, it looked like this:



Upon impact, it became a blur of glass and white dust.  Well, to the camera it wasn't a blur thanks to modern flash units.  There is a lot of detail that can be captured in a burst of light lasting only 0.00003 second (1/30,000) -- things that you just can't see with the naked eye.  For example, the white inner coating of the light bulb disperses in a dusty cloud amid flying shards of glass:



Where did my kids get the crazy idea to photograph a light bulb breaking?  Maybe it's genetic.  When I was in college, I experimented with shooting "freeze photos," i.e. isolating an instant of time using a flash unit.  For example, here is a light bulb I broke with a hammer, captured on old-fashioned film one summer between school years:



Maybe I'll post some of my other college-days "freeze photos" in a later blog entry.

In the meantime, it's nice to know that the high-speed photography genes have been passed on to the next generation!  With a modern digital SLR and sensor-based electronic flash triggering equipment, who knows what kind of fantastic images will get captured?  :-)

Metallic HDR

This is an HDR shot of Two Jack Lake near Banff, Canada. In order to show the sunlight glinting off the water at the same time as the fall colors in the foreground, it was necessary to employ the magic of Photomatix's HDR image processing.  It was able to compress my camera's 14-bit-per-pixel-color dynamic brightness range down to the 8-bit-per-pixel-color of standard displays and printing systems.  The result most closely matches what I saw with my own eyes; I was able to observe the scene with both the sun's reflection and the fall leaves at the same time.  Indeed, that is the goal of HDR.

But it still wasn't quite right.  When I looked at the actual sunlight reflection, my eyes had to adjust -- I could sense that there was extra brightness there.  I was squinting slightly since it was, after all, very bright.



Some day, screens will break out of the legacy 8-bit-per-pixel-color and display a higher dynamic range.  They will glow so brightly that you'll need to squint when faced with reflected sunlight.

Metallic printing paper gives us a preview.  I'm currently looking at an 8x10 print of the photo above, in a nice matted frame.  Each mini-sun from the lake wavelets is glowing out at me.  It's even bright enough to inspire slight squinting.  The print reflects ambient light -- white is still white, yellow is still yellow -- but it jumps out at the viewer.  So, things that are full-on-white in the photo (RGB 127,127,127) are actually brighter-than-white.  (This is an option from Mpix, the photo service I use for "nice" prints to be framed, etc.)

It's not perfect of course, since you have to be standing in just the right place to see the effect.  But it's a little hint of what might come in the future with High Dynamic Range displays.