Making the Ordinary Extraordinary

This is truly worth a few minutes out of your day: Wired.com's Gadget Lab has posted some footage from a high-speed camera, along with an article that details the history of a camera that can shoot up to 86,000 frames per second--keep in mind, the average movie reel only needs 30 or so. From the article: 

A hummingbird’s neck is structured like a bucket holding liquids that slosh back and forth to stabilize its head. Because it evolved this way, the bird has an adaptive advantage to find flowers and food that other animals can’t reach.

This accidental discovery was observed not by human eyes, but through the lens of a super high-speed camera. It’s just one example of interesting phenomena revealed when video is played back in extreme slow motion. The hummingbird clip appeared in an episode of Time Warp, a show whose premise is to make the ordinary extraordinary with one trick: slowing it down.

“We’ve evolved for 5 billion years just to do what we needed to do to be alive … and we can see 30 to 50 things a second,” said Jeff Lieberman, co-host of Time Warp. “With high-speed cameras we can see a million things a second, and we’re looking at everyday things and seeing an entire world that exists underneath.”

Typically costing upward of $100,000, high-speed cameras are capable of shooting at amazingly high frame rates, stretching a single second into minutes of super slow-motion playback. In order to achieve this feat, each of these cameras draws its powers from a unique, highly advanced complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) — or, in simpler terms, an extremely beefed-up pixel sensor. The cameras were designed for military testing, scientific research and other industry applications.

The article features some truly amazing footage of a hummingbird, a tattoo, a high dive, and blowing bubbles, all in slow motion. But what I really recommend is checking out the footage of a gigantic 12-foot wave, from the inside out--a BBC promo for their upcoming series South Pacific.  

High-Speed Cameras Reveal the World Inside Time (Wired.com)