Moving Still
Droplets of water hover, merging in mid-air, a bullet spirals up its barrel towards you, a wet dog very slowly shakes itself, starfish scurry about the seafloor, spark plugs gradually spread their fire and flowers burst open, only to collapse and die in a few seconds. This is the world of high-speed and time-lapse photography.
By chopping up time into little pieces, scientific photographers have been able to provide beautiful and surprising answers to a range of questions. How does a human hand chop through blocks of wood? How does a flying insect keep its body still? What causes machine tools to fail? And what happens in the first millisecond of a nuclear explosion?
From the early exposures of several hours, cameras have advanced to produce images at a scarcely believable ten million pictures per second-and that's still not fast enough.
Narrator BRIAN CARROLL Film editor JOHN STOTHART
Editor SIMON CAMPBELL-JONES Written and produced by CHRISTOPHER HAWS