Wouldn’t it be great to freeze time at the exact moment to see a rain drop create splash? Every day little things like this surround us and most of the time we don’t even realize, most of the time because they happen at such a high speed we can’t see them.

We decided to rig up a sensor that would detect the exact moment when the drop created the splash. We pointed a laser light at a Light Dependent Resistor so that it would read its maximum value. As soon as the drop would cut the beam, the LDR would read a different value and that would trigger the picture. But the problem is, it happens at such a high speed, the camera’s shutter didn’t have time to operate. To fix that we did the experiment in a dark room, and set the camera in “bulb” mode, which means the shutter opens as long as the button is pressed. Then it was a case of rigging it up to the flashes and we had it.

The procedure was: lights off, camera on, FLASH!, camera off, lights on, WOW!

We did the same for the balloon by setting up a microphone that would pick up the peak when the balloon popped, triggering the picture.

We had a great time, made a real mess but definitely ended up with some really cool pictures!