I’ve been a little quiet on the astro-imaging front this last week as I have had an unexpected electronics repair job to carry out!Another hobby area of mine involves photography, but at the other extreme end of the spectrum to astrophotography. Whereas many of my deep-sky images take in excess of 12 hours exposure time, this other hobby involves exposure times of around 25 microseconds or 1/40,000 second.
It is high-speed flash photography.
Some 25 years ago I built the first highly portable high-power high-speed flashguns for my brother who is into nature photography, mostly birds and insects in flight. I developed these units for the following 20 years and they are the only ones of their type on the planet – no commercial manufacturers make anything like them.
Recently my brother (who lives in Surfers Paradise, Australia) sold his set of guns to a U.K. professional photographer (who shall remain nameless) and he promptly managed to turn the 3 units into completely non-functioning boxes. He did quite a number on them as it took me around 2 days to fix each unit, but now they’re all up and running again.
You can see some images taken with these units on my High Speed Flash pages over at AOL. As you will see, I am currently talking to a manufacturer who would like to build market and sell these flashguns. I shall be talking to these guys again next week and hope we can come to some arrangement.
It’s very strange, but for over 20 years no commercial manufacturer has been interested in making these units for the public, but recently the enquiries have been coming in thick and fast from people wanting to buy high-speed flash [HSF]. I think it’s the coming of the digital camera age that has swung things around.
So, if you are interested in this other branch of photography, keep an eye on my HSF site to remain up to date with the latest developments.
On the astro-imaging front I am writing some posts about the equipment I currently use and Noel and I are still preparing images – I hope to have something for you soon 🙂
