High Speed flash photography of Balloons Popping. At the FOO Camp recently, people demonstrated home-brew High Speed Flash Cameras. They invited people to pop balloons with a needle and caught the balloons mid-pop.
High Speed photography has been long since a way of observation in the scientific process, a pioneer of which being Harold Eugene Edgerton, namesake of the Edgerton Center at MIT. At MIT, they even have a class dedicated to strobe photography.
The way those photographs manage to capture the transient and so blatantly holds them unchanged for all time to come often manages to create a surrealistic imbalance in my mind. There's always something very exotic and wrong about those pictures, something that defies common sense and experience. Yet at the same time, the logical portion of my mind can easily accept that those are mere snapshots of something in motion. I suppose what I feel when I see those pictures can be best expressed as a conflict of knowledge and experience in the form of Zeno's arrow paradox.