In today’s fast paced world, it is easy to miss things that pass us by all too quickly. For this reason, photography has become increasingly more popular. You can hardly turn around without finding someone taking a picture of something, be it food, a sunset, a selfie, a puppy, or any number of any things. However the applications of photography and film reach much further than the perfect social media post capturing the memories from any given day. With the use of high speed cameras, the ability to learn more about the way that the world around us works becomes more accessible.
Bringing the world into focus with a high speed camera
Over the course of the last several decades, we have seen rapid progress and development in the world of technology, allowing us to examine, explore, and understand aspects of this world and life that we never had the tools with which to do so before. The perfect example of this is how we are now able to use high speed cameras to capture motion that is typically too fast for the human brain to decipher, playing back that motion at slower speeds to understand a variety of different aspects of the world around us, from the inner workings of a machine or intricate mechanism to the patterns and habits of plants and animals.
Putting a high speed camera to work for progress
A normal photograph that is taken in sunlight will typically be shot from a camera that has a shutter speed of around 1/125th of a second. But the ultrahigh-speed cameras used for vision research use speeds far faster than that. At shutter speeds as fast as 1/8000th of a second, these cameras can capture things that previously may have seemed invisible to the human eye, or at least impossible to detect. Sometimes referred to as super slow motion cameras because of the ability to play back the footage at speeds slowed down incredibly in order to give us the ability to decipher what has been seen, these cameras are vital for understanding a vast array of motion. Being able to see these types of things gives our species an ability to comprehend so much more than we could possibly do on our own, without the help of this technology.
Putting together a better understanding of biomechanics
The applications for such an apparatus are nearly limitless. There are cameras that can easily by far exceed 100,000 frames per second, and these cameras are often put to work in laboratory research. In fact these cameras that are capable of capturing such high speeds have been vital in the continued progress and development of understanding the world of biomechanics, or the structure and movement of living beings. And not just one type of human being, but essentially any living being, from humans and other animals to plants, right down to fungi and even cells. While a standard movie camera will record images at about 18 frames per second, these distinct cameras have the capacity to operate at thousands of frames per second. Utilizing these cameras, and basically slowing down that intense motion to a speed that can be better analyzed and in greater detail, allows incredible discoveries to be made.
Continued development
If our species has been able to come so far in such a short amount of time, as far as technology is concerned, think of all the amazing inventions and advancements we have yet to see. New discoveries are being made and new understandings reached, each and every single day due to the use of constantly evolving technology. If we can manage to continue to adapt and evolve that new technology, in a way that is harmonious with the environment, there is no telling what bright and beautiful future lies in wait ahead.
