Where is Ctein when you need him? I shouldn't be writing this. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden recently announced that they have developed the world's fastest camera, capable of five trillion exposures per second, according to an article at IFLScience. I couldn't find an April 1st dateline. The article claims the scientists can photograph light itself, traversing a distance equivalent to the thickness of a sheet of paper. "The researchers could film events as short as 0.2 trillionths of a second, the fastest ever possible. This is fast enough to actually visualize the movement of light. You can see this in the video [at the link], which shows the movement of light in femtoseconds—one millionth of a billionth of a second...."
Things like this are why less educated people mistrust science. How is this less preposterous than alien flying saucers or ghost sightings, on the face of it?
Anyway, we're photographers, so no worries! Our usual reflexes tell us how to respond: "I need one." Your Sony A7R II, Leica SL Typ 601, Canon 5DS R or Fuji GFX-50S all just got horribly, pathetically inadequate. Sorry. Start saving now.
First guy who owns a 5-trillion FPS camera wins.
Mike
(Thanks to Steven Ralser)
Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
Not fast, but good, but not fast
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Zack Schindler: "Yeah the camera might be fast but how good is the bokeh? And some of the pictures are soft in the corners when I blow them up 2000%. Don't see any mention about how good the micro contrast is. Not going to buy the current version but will wait until the next one comes out because the rumor site says that it will be twice as betterer! Oh and the rumor site also says that Leica is coming out with one wrapped in unicorn leather rubbed with mermaid tears."
Paul: "How many frames can this camera take before the buffer is full? I assume that the whole duration that can be photographed/filmed that way is less than a millisecond. And since most of our subjects tend to move or change very, very little over such a short time, you may as well make do with shooting a single frame instead of taking the same photo more than a billion times ;-) .
"Now on the other hand, if you average all of them, the result should be completely noise-free. Hmmm...."
Bill Tyler: "Here's a little background for readers who aren't chemists or physicists. That diagram is a take-off on phase diagrams used to show the states of matter (solid, liquid, gas) at various combinations of temperature and pressure. Here's an example, for water."
hugh crawford: "Re 'the fastest camera ever, able to capture an astonishing 5 trillion frames a second.' All true except that it's not a 'camera,' it can't take 'frames' (I assume if it is recording a single photon it has a resolution of one pixel?) and it can't run for a second, so no five trillion 'frames.'
"It's sort of like saying the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport can go 254 miles in an hour, except that you would have to stop for gas six times, replace the tires about five times, and replace the wheels once or twice. 'A set of the Super Sport’s special Michelin tires costs $42,000 and may last 10,000 miles if you’re careful, though they last only 15 minutes at the car’s top speed (at that pace, however, the 26.4-gallon tank is sucked dry in just 10 minutes, and there’s no place on Earth to safely go that fast that long anyway, so no worries). At the third tire replacement, Michelin requires that you also swap out the $69,000 wheels—coincidentally, the only wheels that fit those tires—to ensure a proper bead seal.'"
vijay: "And you thought editing was hard now...."
Norm Nicholson: "To overcome this problem, I am planning on working on a project that I am calling “BRAIN” (Binary Recursive Anal Intensive Nooks.) The concept is brilliantly simple, or perhaps simply brilliant. Say you take a photo of your friend Paul standing on the grass in front of your house. Sometime later you look at that photograph. Now who better to analyze that photo than you? My device scans your brain! (neurons, neuralgic synapses, hemispheric kinks, thought patterns, etc). When it finishes scanning scanning your brain, BRAIN quickly categorises your photo for you. With sufficient funding, it should be ready in a few months. P. S. Mike, can you direct me to a good Crowd Funding website?"
Mike replies: Can't you scan my brain for that information?
Stephen S. Mack: "Wins what?"
Mike replies: Ooh, now you're getting all bro-existential.
Nicholas Condon: "Okay, I am not Ctein, but I am an honest-to-Feynman optical scientist (who specializes in lasers and nonlinear optics), so I pulled the original paper and read it. This is amazingly clever stuff, but it's not exactly what you'd call a general-purpose camera. For one thing, its temporal resolution is provided by the exotically short laser pulse used for illumination, which puts some rather stringent limits on the sort of thing being imaged. It's also not exactly going to acquire a 10-second burst of images, either...."
I really didn't quite understand the technique involved. I am confident Ctein could explain it in a splendid manner. Wish he would chime-in.
- Aashish
Posted by: Aashish Sharma | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 01:56 PM
I don't have anything intelligent to say. So, instead, let me suggest that this camera might just be able to photograph the elusive perfectum, the long sought quantum particle that carries perfectionism through the ether. The perfectum is thought to travel at several times the speed of light and is existentially persistent: it can neither be created nor destroyed. It is and ever shall be. How clever of you to suggest a hidden way to connect yesterday's post with today's!
Posted by: Jim Richardson | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 02:21 PM
Pah! No power booster grip, no sale.
Posted by: Steve P | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 02:24 PM
Fun Fact to Know and Tell
It would require 158,549 years to find a definitive decisive moment in a 1-second "burst" from that camera.*
* Assuming viewing 1 frame/second, with no sleep, nutrition, or bathroom breaks.
Posted by: Kenneth Tanaka | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 03:23 PM
Doc. Edgerton would be proud of this achievement - http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/techniques/high-speed-photography. Some of the movies of nuclear tests taken using his equipment have recently been put on YouTube - https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvGO_dWo8VfcmG166wKRy5z-GlJ_OQND5
Posted by: Jim | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 03:53 PM
This fascinating stuff. Here is a lecture from TED on this subject from 2012. Boggles the mind. https://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_one_trillion_frames_per_second
Posted by: RICHARD GREEN | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 03:57 PM
If I spend, lets say $50K for this rig, I'll have to sell at least 15,300 stock copies at 6.50 ea. at 50% net commish. Don't steal my keywords!
Posted by: Redwood 1 | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 04:31 PM
Two and a half trillion frames just before what I want followed by two and a half trillion just after. It's a given.
Posted by: mike plews | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 04:57 PM
Good initial question...
Posted by: Del Bomberger | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 05:04 PM
"Instead of taking images one by one in a sequence, like other high-speed cameras, this took four separate images per frame. The researchers called the technology Frequency Recognition Algorithm for Multiple Exposures (FRAME)."
Gah, I've been doing that for years, I call it System for High Algorithm Kinimatic Exposure (SHAKE)
Posted by: David Cope | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 05:59 PM
"Things like this are why less educated people mistrust science"
As uneducated man who loves science, I'd say that sounds like reverse causation, but I left school early so what do I know
Posted by: Sean | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 06:28 PM
To get that kind of frame rate, the ISO must be insanely high, in the quadrillions or beyond. Better be noise-free too! Battery life is rumored to be 500 shots, or roughly 0.000000001 second.
Posted by: toto | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 07:55 PM
How much storage space does 1 trillion photos take for a 1 second burst. The buffer would have to be immense. Is anyone interested in editing down 1 trillion pictures on a light table or a monitor?
I remember the US government designed a special camera that ran an immense amount of film through it. This was so they could see the explosion of an above ground atomic bomb. The frames were so fast the stills showed the explosion bursting through the case around the bomb.
Posted by: Mathew Hargreaves | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 09:16 PM
TECHNOLOGY NOT PHOTOGRAPHY
[I'm sorta being tongue-in-cheek James. --Mike]
Posted by: james nicol | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 09:48 PM
If you think that is something... I can photograph a SunBurn in progress!
Posted by: Daniel | Thursday, 04 May 2017 at 11:45 PM
Considering that intended use of this purpose built camera is to capture what's going on inside combustion chamber of an engine ... just think for a second what that environment would do to your favorite model hair ... back-lit or not ...
Posted by: P@L | Friday, 05 May 2017 at 12:07 AM
Useful rule of thumb from my undergraduate days was that light traveled about one foot per nanosecond. So we're looking at less than a thousandth of a foot, or about twelve thousandths of an inch- ie around double the valve clearances in your car.
Posted by: David | Friday, 05 May 2017 at 02:36 AM
What size SD card does it use, and how many picoseconds does it take to fill it up?
Posted by: Steve Jacob | Friday, 05 May 2017 at 03:16 AM
Fantastic stuff!
More prosaically, commercial cameras are available off the shelf which "only" do 10 million frames per second...
Posted by: Stuart | Friday, 05 May 2017 at 07:13 AM
"... events that cannot be caught on FILM today." (emphasis mine). That made me laugh.
I wonder, if we take Ken Tanaka's premise above and move from time to a physical object, how long would that strip of film be?
Posted by: Michel | Friday, 05 May 2017 at 08:57 AM
I suspect Ken Tanaka didn't include the impact of leap years in his calculation of how many years. By the Gregorian calendar, the task would come more than a lifetime faster: 158,443 years and by astronomical Julian calendar it would be 158,440 years (approximately).
Of course, this is premised on the rotation of earth, and it's orbit round old Sol, as being constant between now and then, but certainly those are false assumptions.
Patrick
Posted by: Patrick Perez | Friday, 05 May 2017 at 08:03 PM
I have a dilemma...
If the camera can capture the photons traveling the thickness of the sheet of paper (every frame captures that traveled distance)....
And photon is the smallest energy that has "light".
From where does the light come from that photon to the camera?
Okay.... So if I take a E27 lighbulb and I power it up with a cord and then I throw it in air and I use high speed camera to capture its motion....
The camera i receiving the photons it emits as well that are bouncing off from it and those enters to the speed camera lens and to the sensor....
Now swap that lightbulb to as photon... How can a photon transmit more photons from it, that are captured?
What I am trying to understand, is how we can "see" a photon, when we need that photon to be captured to be seen?
Posted by: Fri13 | Sunday, 07 May 2017 at 05:42 AM