high speed photography strobe

[vaaern]

I have a question but don't know where to put it. I also didn't search for similar question because I have a really slow internet connection.
I want to buy a strobe light to try high speed photography, does this have to be a real flash or could I use any strobe light i find? thanks in advance

[OsmosisStudios]

It'll likely have to be a studio strobe, and depending on how fast you want to be shooting, it might have to be a fairly powerful one too.

[Swisstony10]

Are you wanting to do that kind of high-speed photography where you have a completely dark room, you have the shutter open for about 15 seconds, and then fire a strobe multiple times very quickly while that person runs across the room so that you get a trail of images of them on a single frame? (like some of these - http://www.warrenphotographic.co.uk/...ple_images.htm) If so, then something like a 580EXII has a setting that will do it, but they're fairly expensive, compared with something like a strobe light that a mobile disco would use, which can be had from Maplin for hardly any money these days.

If not, and you're talking about using very high shutter speeds with a single pulse of light for a frozen frame, then Os is bang on the money - you'll definitely need a dedicated photography flash because it'll need to sync with a camera shutter which is only open for a fraction of a second.

Most studio strobes only fire for a tiny fraction of a second too, which means if you want to capture very quick moment, you can have a long shutter and fire the strobe remotely manually to freeze motion, if that's what you're after.

Russ.

[vaaern]

Originally Posted by Swisstony10

Are you wanting to do that kind of high-speed photography where you have a completely dark room, you have the shutter open for about 15 seconds, and then fire a strobe multiple times very quickly while that person runs across the room so that you get a trail of images of them on a single frame? (like some of these - Professional Multiple Image & Strobe Photographs) If so, then something like a 580EXII has a setting that will do it, but they're fairly expensive, compared with something like a strobe light that a mobile disco would use, which can be had from Maplin for hardly any money these days.

If not, and you're talking about using very high shutter speeds with a single pulse of light for a frozen frame, then Os is bang on the money - you'll definitely need a dedicated photography flash because it'll need to sync with a camera shutter which is only open for a fraction of a second.

Most studio strobes only fire for a tiny fraction of a second too, which means if you want to capture very quick moment, you can have a long shutter and fire the strobe remotely manually to freeze motion, if that's what you're after.

Russ.

In tutorials I've seen they say "open up the shutter for a certain amount of time and flash with a strobeflash" but I figured that doing that will work as well with a disco strobe. the only hard thing will be some timing but since the one I found resonds on sound I think it could work.

[Swisstony10]

The main issue with using a "disco" type of strobe for this kind of thing, is that although you can probably control the speed, or rate, of the flashing (and it should be relatively easy to control when it starts and stops just by switching it on and off), you have no control over the intensity of the light.

That means you'll have to go through a fair bit of trial and error to get your aperture setting just right, but hey - that's what this kind of experimentation is all about! You could try using a light meter to measure the strength of each flash, but you'll probably find that a disco strobe light isn't anywhere near as consistent as something like a speedlight or similar.

Incidentally, if you use a 580EXII (not sure about the other EX range) you can set it to fire multiple pulses with a certain amount of control over the rate of pulsing. Not sure if that's going to be right for what you're after though.

Do you want to, for example, get a dancer to do a big leap in a dark room while you have the shutter open for a few seconds, and fire the flash once part-way through to get them frozen in mid-air, or are you wanting to fire the flash several times to get a series of images on the same frame?

[vaaern]

I think I'll better start with one flash!

[aprillove20]

It depend on how fast you want to be shooting.