This 11-minute video will start your Thursday off on a good footing by expanding your thinking for today. MIT Professor Ramesh Raskar at the TED Talks. ("Femto-" [symbol f] is a prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of 10^−15 or 0.000000000000001.) I love that it would take a year to record a bullet moving the same distance as the light inside the Coke bottle.
Here's a link to a TED Talks page which might be a better-quality video for you (I had problems embedding that video here). And here's a link to a bio page describing who Ramesh is and what's so interesting about his talk.
Mike
(Thanks to David Dyer-Bennet)
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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.
Featured Comment by rnewman: "WHEEEEE!!! Around 1970 we were doing 100,000 fps for photographing explosions, and that was state of the art. A 1^-2 second exposure used lots of film, especially when you considered the spin-up time before actual exposure. I'd love to get a chance to work with this. Ain't science grand??"
Featured Comment by Ed: "Yeps, computational photography rules...absolutely. By the way, I stopped worrying about megapixels when I made a 2.3 gigapixel picture with a $99 Panosaurus, a $100 kit lens, and $100 worth of software...now that was 5.8x2.9 meters in size at 300 DPI. And I didn't even need femtoseconds to do it (in fact it took me 21 minutes of shooting and two days of processing). And then I found out that I hadn't enough webspace to show it :-)—the JPEG data was 590 MB, my webspace only 500. "
A trillion fps? Spray and pray, spray and pray...
Posted by: David A. Goldfarb | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 06:57 AM
Interesting. However, much of the possible usage put forward can as easily be resolved using sound rather than light.
Posted by: m3photo | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 07:02 AM
That's a Sigma 28-70/2.8 zoom lens on that femtocamera! Wow!
Pak
Posted by: Pak-Ming Wan | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 07:04 AM
I can see the threads on the forums:
Posted by: Bernard Scharp | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 07:23 AM
Way cool!
Posted by: John Brewton | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 07:26 AM
I wonder if this might be a useful tool for lens makers. By allowing direct observation of how light is reflected, focused, and scattered, lens designs made with the help of computer calculations can be put to the test.
Posted by: Zeeman | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 07:31 AM
What really bakes my noodle is how the light bouncing around inside the tomato makes it glow long after the main light show. We have experience with light from a certain angle revealing the texture of something - to see how it feels without touching it. Now we can have new experiences that tell us even more.
Posted by: Michael Barkowski | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 08:00 AM
I studied the history of photography in college while completing my photography course; this has to be one of the most significant moments in photography to this date. Science fiction becomes science now. Wonderous.
Posted by: Sean Dwyer | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 09:45 AM
Worlds coolest LavaLamp.
Posted by: Mike Plews | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 10:15 AM
Where will Photoshop place the remove space-time warping filter? Looks to me like there's going to be a whole new tab added to Camera RAW.
Posted by: Dave | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 10:22 AM
A development that certainly challenges the boundaries of imagination.
@ Sean: Actually, it's not as much a big moment for "photography" but rather for scientific applications of photography. It's a logical progression made possible by today's inexpensively available massive data storage technologies and computational power.
Harold Edgerton's seminal work in modern (single-camera) high-speed photography (also performed at MIT) produced some fascinating and beautiful images. The "milk drop" and "apple bullet" images have become almost cliche cultural icons. But its significance was mainly in scientific study rather than new aesthetic frontiers.
If you're looking for the original pioneer of stop-motion photography you have to go back 70+ years before Edgerton. Britsh photographer Eadweard Muybridge conducted the first (known) motion studies 70+ years before even Edgerton's work in the 1950's. (If you're in Chicago and want to see one in-person the Art Institute of Chicago actually has one of Muybridge's prints on exhibit right now.)
Again, though, it was a big moment for discovery of science's use of photography but not so much for photography, per se.
Posted by: Kenneth Tanaka | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 12:38 PM
Thanks for the exposure!
Posted by: Riley | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 12:55 PM
Russell Brown sees this and his brain explodes, all caught in femtophase. LOL
Posted by: Tony Roberts | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 01:13 PM
Dear folks,
A bit of technical nomenclature that may confuse people who aren't familiar with it.
In electro optics and photonics, the habit is to talk about time regimes by the units that are used. In other words, anything measured in, say, picoseconds (that is, less than a nanosecond) is just referred to as "picosecond" with no number attached.
It's confusing at first-- you read a reference to a "picosecond detector" and you assume a trillionth of a second. But it could actually be 10 or 100 picoseconds. One gets used to it.
So, when Ramesh refers to femtosecond work, what he really means is that they're slicing things finer than a picosecond.
pax / Ctein
Posted by: Ctein | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 03:43 PM
My thinking has been expanded. No wonder I've had a headache all day! : ]
Posted by: Roger Bradbury | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 04:34 PM
As an artist I see so many possible uses for this. Truly exciting in so many ways.
Posted by: David Boyce | Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 11:42 PM
Femtophotography requires a very fancy intervalometer, so when femtophotography is available in consumer cameras Canonians will finally get an onboard intervalometer :-)
Posted by: Mandeno Moments | Friday, 17 August 2012 at 03:34 AM
Very cool! It's an interesting extension of high speed sampling technology - something fiber optics uses today for testing called "optical time domain reflectometry" that takes "snapshots" of optical fiber -speeded up considerably. OTDRs can look at a length of fiber as short as a meter, about 5 nanoseconds (billionths of a sec).
BTW, Doc. Edgerton who did all those famous strobe shots (he invented the strobe first) founded a company called EG&G which was mainly involved in detonating nuclear bombs for the US government. Another development from EG&G was high dynamic range film which used three layers of emulsions with different sensitivities to record wide ranges of light. One of the uses was taking photos of nuclear blasts-photos you have seen many times.
Posted by: J | Friday, 17 August 2012 at 03:44 AM
No much worries about camera shake then......
Posted by: Ger lawlor | Friday, 17 August 2012 at 04:12 AM
I stand corrected Ken, my photography course was part of the Applied Science Department at the Dublin Institute of Technology. It's the unforeseen scientific potential of a device such as this which really captures my imagination. Watching the motion of photons moving through a bottle of coke was something which 'lit up' the now rusting and dark scientific corner of my brain. Certainly Edward Muggeridge was the pioneer.
Posted by: Sean Dwyer | Friday, 17 August 2012 at 04:34 AM
For me it is a stroboscope with very short flash. Presentation, unfortunately, is very much TED-oriented -- too much hype. This guy is co-director of future storytelling.
Posted by: sergei antonov | Saturday, 18 August 2012 at 03:08 AM