A gallery of the equipment I'm developing for high speed photography.

The rig is controlled using an Arduino micro controller.

It is set up for taking pictures of balloons being popped by blowdarts.

The camera is set to bulb mode. There are separate wires for the shutter half-press and shutter release functions.

The control panel has a start and stop button. The start button arms the system for taking pictures.

When the system is armed and the beam of the blowdart sensor is broken, the Arduino turns off the LED room lights and opens the camera shutter (holding the camera open.)

There is a piezo vibration sensor attached to the back side of the balloon and wired to a vibration sensor circuit on the breadboard. When armed, this circuit triggers the camera flash directly, as well as sending a signal to the Arduino on a digital input pin. When the Arduino detects vibration, it pauses for a millisecond, then closes the camera shutter, pauses again, and finally turns the LED room lights back on.

LEDs turn off so quickly that by the time the camera shutter is open, all the lights in the room are off.

The shutterspeed is usually 1/10 to 1/60 of a second, depending on how fast the blowdart hits the balloon.