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K200D shutter video

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First attempt at capturing high-speed motion. This is a Pentax K200D shutter, as seen by a K100D and a high-speed strobe. Timing is provided by a few lines of C bitbanging a PC parallel port (in DOS, with interrupts disabled, natch).

Stop action is provided by the "winder mode" on a Metz 45-CT5, with its 90 microsecond flash duration, and its <0.5s recycle time was good for the hundred shots it took to do this. Acquired shot-to-shot "frame period" is about 1 ms, and this is playing back at about 100x slower than realtime. The K200D shutter speed here is 1/180s.

The K200 (and probably the K100 too) has awful shot-to-shot jitter, so this had to be manually sorted a bit and about a third of the frames tossed, so the effective frame period averages more like 1.3ms. 

Comments

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P^2  Pro User  says:

Toolset:
Turbo C 2.0 (from 1988!), running on Win98 DOS
IrfanView
Microsoft Movie Maker

The interface is just a sawed-off parallel port cable driving optoisolators to the flash and the two cameras, dead-bug style. Not a thing of beauty.
Posted 7 months ago. ( permalink )

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photoplasia  Pro User  says:

Sweet!
Posted 7 months ago. ( permalink )

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photomastergreg  Pro User  says:

I had to fave this video! This one is too awesome, not to share! I have tried to explain to people what goes on in a DSLR and you have shown it perfectly! Thanks so much for sharing!



Please share your brilliant work at the Brilliant Ideas group: Brilliant Ideas
Please tag your image with "Brilliant Ideas"
Posted 7 months ago. ( permalink )

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Isaac E  Pro User  says:

i still dont have a clue what you are on about in the description. Is this one fire of the shutter or 1 fire of the shutter per frame in this video?

Excellent job!
Posted 7 months ago. ( permalink )

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P^2  Pro User  says:

Thanks, all, and a big welcome to all the folks visiting from MAKE: magazine.

More description:
This is a movie assembled from 100 individual shots, acquired about a second apart under computer control. The sequence goes like:
1. trigger the K100D to take a picture, with 1/4s shutter speed
2. wait 1/10 s for its shutter to open
3. trigger the K200D to fire its shutter
4. wait N milliseconds
5. fire the flash
6. wait a half second for both the cameras to recock for the next frame
7. repeat steps 1-6 100 times, increasing N each time, thereby getting a slightly later phase in the shutter cycle.

I didn't run it long enough to get the mirror dropping down again though.

Since there is a lot of jitter in the K200D trigger-to-open time, I had to remove some duplicate frames, and re-order a few, using IrfanView's batch processing. Trimming the beginning and the end of the sequence gave me about 50-60 good frames that make this movie.

Notes in the next picture of my photostream show more detail.
Posted 7 months ago. ( permalink )

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P^2  Pro User  says:

Seeing the MAKE: comments, I'm not too surprised to learn this has been done before, with a nice slick interactive interface to visualize it too: regex.info/blog/2008-09-04/925 (originally from: actionphotosbymarianne.com/D3shutter.html )

But oy, what pain she went through to get those frames. Here I was annoyed at having to actually write a 6-line program and spend 15 minutes selecting frames. She used an extra flash, phototransistors and an oscilloscope to manually measure the delays. What patience!
Posted 7 months ago. ( permalink )

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ross millar  Pro User  says:

very cool.
Posted 7 months ago. ( permalink )

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Jim Rees says:

I'd say that worked amazingly well.
Posted 6 months ago. ( permalink )

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P^2  Pro User  says:

For the amount of effort that went into it (read: not much), I'd agree.

I'm most amazed at the remarkable stability of that Metz flash: there is essentially no visible shot-to-shot variation in brightness.

Now I'm trying to think of other examples of high-speed repetitive motion to get movies of.
Posted 6 months ago. ( permalink )

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Jim Rees says:

I'd love to try this with the movement in my Accutron but the frequency involved (around 400Hz) might be a problem. Besides, the Accutron stopped running a few years ago.
Posted 6 months ago. ( permalink )

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misterken  Pro User  says:

Smooth....
Posted 6 months ago. ( permalink )

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andy.lin  Pro User  says:

cool~
Posted 6 months ago. ( permalink )

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traumlichtfabrik (BBB - back but busy)  Pro User  says:

soooo cool! especially since I own a K200D
Posted 5 months ago. ( permalink )

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Trendy Huby  Pro User  says:

wow
Posted 5 months ago. ( permalink )

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view photos Uploaded on January 4, 2009
by P^2

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This video also belongs to:

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MAKE (Pool)

High Speed Photography (Pool)

PoorManHacks (Pool)

Taken with PENTAX K100D Series Digital SLR (Pool)

*DIY Photography Equipment (Pool)

Metz Support group (Pool)

Pentax K200D (Pool)

Brilliant Ideas (Pool)

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