High Speed Liquids
I enjoy photography. I also enjoy making cool things. In this project, which is one of my favorites so far, I found a way to fuse these two interests of mine, which is something I quite enjoy doing with my interests.
Over the Summer of 2012, I made a quite in depth investigation into high speed photography, with liquids in particular. I used a solution of half milk, half water, and some food coloring. My investigation began by splashing around with a syringe in a glass bowl with a shallow puddle of this liquid. The images I got were pretty interesting! Many of them resembled the well known droplet photographs that everyone things of.
So those photos were pretty cool. It was really satisfying to be able to produce that, but I wasn't going to be finished there. I wondered to myself, "What if I could make two of these liquid streams hit each other in midair and ripple outward into a disc?" That image stuck in my head, and I was determined to make it happen. It looked a bit like this:
As you can see, I was successful in creating that image. It took a fair bit of sweat, quite a lot of experimentation, and a nice handful of money- that is a bit more than a hundred dollars or so, but I did manage to do it. It's a really good feeling.
Here's four more!
How does it work?
The solutions are contained in two mason jars. Under the table, there is a paintball CO2 tank filled with around 60 - 80 PSI of air, filled with a bike pump. A solenoid valve releases a burst of that air into two tubes, leading to each of the jars. The air pushes the liquid down and up through the straw in the jar and out of the nozzle, which was mounted on a flexible gooseneck microphone arm for ease of directing the stream.
The activation of the valve and the camera shutter are both automated using an Arduino. The user enters two time values- the duration that the valve is open, in milliseconds, and the time after the valve opens that the camera shutter is to fire, also in milliseconds. I packed the electronic control system into a nice little interface which the camera and valve could plug into and with buttons with which the user can change those two values and view them on the LCD display.
If connected to a computer, the values can also be viewed on the Arduino's serial communication window. The last picture taken is displayed on the computer by Canon's EOS utility program.
