Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Shooting food footage has always been changing. Aside from getting the framing, lighting, and general composition right, you also need to make sure the food looks good. And if you want to add motion to the shot, it adds another layer of complexity.
We took the DigitalFoto 360 spinner for a ride and learned quite a few things about feed photography along the way, here is what we learned:
It’s no secret that we’re big fans of The Slow Mo Guys here at DIYP. But when they team up with one of our other favourite YouTubers, like Mehdi Sadaghdar – otherwise known as ElectroBOOM – you just know it’s going to get crazy. After the boys saw one of Mehdi’s videos they knew they just had to collaborate with him on something extra special involving electricity and… Well, they’re The Slow Mo Guys, so they made it happen.
Mehdi travelled all the way from Vancouver, Canada down to Texas, with a lot of dodgy-looking electronics in his carry-on luggage to film with the guys. Not surprisingly, Mehdi got a few shocks along the way – and they all looked like genuine accidents this time – but you’ll all be pleased to know that Dan did, too!
There seems to be a weird obsession with super slow movie players lately. I’ve seen a few of them come scroll up my screen lately, but this one’s… Well, it kinda takes the cake, with a new frame being rendered about every half an hour. And it uses virtually no power in order to be able to do it, too. It’s based off an ESP32 in “Deep Sleep” mode and draws about 12uA (that’s 0.000012 Amps!). It’s projected that its 2,000mAh battery should last… oh, about 1.2 years.
It’s an interesting way to have a kind of constantly changing photo frame, that progresses one frame through a video sequence at a time in extremely slow fashion. One frame every 30 minutes would means that a movie like The Matrix (just the first one, not the whole trilogy) would take just over eleven years to watch in its entirety. In real-time, the duration of The Matrix is about 2 hours and 16 minutes.
I always say that macro photography helps us reveal a whole new world even in the most mundane, everyday objects. But if you pair extreme close-ups with video and slow motion… Well, you get a whole new level of beauty.
Macrofying, a 21-year-old macro photographer from Germany, combines all of these techniques. They zoom into the depths of everyday objects to reveal whole new worlds and show us things like candles, lighters, sand, or popcorn in an entirely new light.
If there’s one thing we know about The Slow Mo Guys, it’s that they’re always chasing ever faster frame rates to capture things in even slower motion. If there’s another thing we know about Gav and Dan, it’s that they like blowing stuff up. And when they combine the two, it always results in some pretty insane footage, letting us see things in ways we never have before.
You’ll be pleased to hear that this video is no exception as the boys add to their familiar array of Phantom cameras with a Shimadzu HPV-X camera that shoots up to a whopping five million frames per second – technically, it can shoot up to ten million but they only take it up to five – to capture shaped charges exploding. This beats their Phantom cameras by an order of magnitude and then some!
This is a video we’ve actually featured before, way back in 2014, but it appears to be making the rounds on social media again and it’s well worth a revisit. It was shot by NASA, obviously, and it’s footage of the Apollo 11 launch, shot on 16mm film at 500 frames per second in 1969. Now, that might not seem like a lot compared to the crazy slow motion cameras available today, but 53 years ago, that was pretty impressive!
When shot at 500 frames per second and played back at 30 frames per second turns that ~30-second real-time clip into an 8-minute and 22-second sequence that you just can’t take your eyes away from. The Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 was an extremely powerful Heavy Lift Vehicle. It was the heaviest rocket ever to ever fly successfully, weighing in at 6.2 million pounds fully loaded.
This is a video of which the T-1000 would certainly approve. In fact, at one point, Dan of The Slow Mo Guys actually says that the scene before them “looks like the T-1000 sneezed in a nightclub”. And he’s not wrong! In this video, Gav and Dan put gallium in a blender and use a Bolt motion control robot arm along with the Laowa 24mm f/14 probe lens to record the swirling vortex of liquid metal.
But that’s not all they did. They busted out a bunch of Titan Tube LED lights, and wrapped the blender in a colour wheel of vibrance that produces some pretty amazing psychedelic results. Even with white light, when everything’s spinning around at a few thousand frames per second it looked pretty trippy, but the coloured LEDs really take things to the next level!
I wondered how long it’d be before these two did some kind of collaboration and now it’s finally here. We’re big fans of The Slow Mo Guys here at DIYP, who use Phantom cameras to show us events recorded in super slow motion, letting us see new things that our eyes simply aren’t capable of spotting in real-time. As well as the obvious visual appeal, the insights into physics and how things work is just fascinating.
Somebody else we’re big fans of is Steve Giralt. We’ve featured Steve’s work on DIYP a number of times. He also shoots slow motion with Phantom cameras, but he mounts them onto the end of super fast Bolt robot arms for commercial work. Gav from The Slow Mo Guys visited Steve and his team in New York to see how the whole system works and to create some pretty epic slow-motion shots.
Gav and Dan are back at it again, and this time they’re firing bullets (and other things) at Newton’s Cradles at 100,000 frames per second. I think we all know how a Newton’s Cradle works. It’s an amusing desktop toy that demonstrates the principle of conservation of momentum. As the first ball drops down from its lifted position, its energy and momentum is passed through the balls in the middle until it hits the end one where it swings up, falls back down and the cycle is repeated.
But what happens when you fire a projectile at it travelling just over the speed of sound? Well, in this video, The Slow Mo Guys find out by firing ball bearings at one using their Malteser launcher and then later fire an actual bullet at one. It’s an intriguing experiment and it’s pretty epic visually, too!
It’s nice to see the band back together and pushing out content regularly again. Gav’s great n’ all, but I’ve missed seeing Dan on The Slow Mo Guys videos and the interactions between them – especially as Dan’s slightly less sane than Gav and willing to take more needless risks for the sake of an entertaining video. There’s not much risk in this video, though, as Dan spends his time living in a bubble. Literally.
Bubbles pop in what appears to be an instant in our real-time eyes. But when you slow it down to 50,000 frames per second, it looks like a weird jelly-like, glossy, transparent, stretchy fabric pulling in on itself and it looks surreal absolutely spectacular!
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