SINGLE FLASH PICTURES

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 November 1940, Page 5

SINGLE FLASH PICTURES

STROBOSCOPE EXPERIMENT People who have been attracted bj some of the “single flash” pictures taken at great speed, showing a drop of milk falling and separating, or z golf club swinging, or a ball in flight may now expect to have the whole process revealed to them shortly on the screen (writes Frank Dougherty in the ‘Christian Science, Monitor’). ‘ Pete Smith, Metro’s short subject specialist, who ordinarily confines himself to humour but sometimes delves into more serious subjects, has invited Harold E. Edgerton, assistant professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to bring his stroboscope experiments to Hollywood and put them into a picture. Some of the “stunts”’ being developed include a football being kicked, a golf ball being photographed as it is knocked through a phone book, a cat drinking milk (Dr. Edgerton says this one will surprise a great many people, who only think they know how a cat drinks milk), cards being shuffled, and a girl jumping rope. There will be others, of course

and perhaps some of those mentioned will be discarded before the picture is done. Dr. Edgerton says Mr. Smith, is being careful to make the pictures as different as possible from slow motion film, which audiences already know. . Thirty-five millimetre exposures J will be at the rate of 2,000 a second; ■ 8 mm. will be considerably higher, ’ j about 6,000 a second. This has the efjfect of stopping motion completely at various stages, revealing action much too quick for the eye. It also does away with one of the oldest methods , of motion pictures photographed on ; film, since it eliminates the shutter and lets the film go through without stopping. The light flashes of the new method are fast enough to | “freeze” the image on the continuous--1 ly moving film passing through the camera at 75 feet, or more, a second. MOTION PICTURES The camera and lights were developed by Dr. Edgerton in association iwith Kenneth J. Germeshausen. and 1 Herbert E. Grier, of M.I.T. But ■ the 1 stroboscope itself is not new of course, ;It is being manufactured now, ac- d cording to Dr. Edgerton, quite expensively for use in industry, and es-

pecially in the automotive industry; where it is used for exact observation of the workings of valves, oil circulation, fan blades, vibration of fenders, snubbers, rear ends, etc. It has even x found some use before now in the motion picture industry, where the sound departments have used it among other things, for measuring the “flutter” in sprockets, and to observe the action of film winding through a camera. One of the most interesting phases of the process, and one which will be magnified and accentuated in the motion picture, will be the aesthetic and ..mathematical phases of stroboscopic photography. Bubbles breaking,- and smoke blowing through fans, forming beautiful vortexes about the blades, allow The spectator to derive an aesthetic pleasure from swift motion. Dr. Edgerton doesn’t expect his process to revolutionise the making of ■ motion pictures. As it is slow motion cranked at;10 times the speed of pre-i sent slow .motion photography, it can J hardly have uses to which slow mo-[ tion has not already been applied. But it can heighten and develop the ef-j fects already obtained by that process. He has greater hope for the “single

flash” picture than for the motion picture development, at present. Single flash pictures taken by this process do not require the disturbing light effects of flashlight pictures, are sharper, and allow as many as three or four cameras to work from the same light at the same time, with 1 flsecond intervals between photographs. He hopes that newspapers will come to make larger use of the single flash than they have. One large chain of newspapers already has bought a number of the lights. At present, he says, most newspapers consider the new photography merely a ' “stunt.” One 'newspaper manager told him: “You’ve already taken all the good pictures. There’s nothing' left to take.” Dr. Edgerton believes they haven’t even begun to' tap the possibilities of, still photography with this method.