Water Drop Slow Motion, originally uploaded by walter gordy.

This is a series of different water drops captured with different time delays. The camera was triggered by a circuit monitoring a photoresistor. A laser beam was aimed at the photoresistor with the drop falling in the path of the beam.  As the drop falls, it breaks the beam causing the circuit to trigger the camera. A configurable time delay was used to capture the drop in a different spot each time. Each frame is a different drop with a longer delay, but the drops were so identical that it appears to be the same drop in a different frame of a slow motion video.

I implemented the circuit with an NPN transistor, a photoresistor, a potentiometer, and an Spartan 3 FPGA to do the timing. The photoresistor and potentiometer allow me to set the sensitivity of the trigger so that a drop will trigger the camera correctly in any type of lighting conditions. Photos were taken with a Canon T1i and two strobes. The Canon camera and laser trigger allowed me to get very repeatable shots that captured the drop in nearly the same exact spot. An increment to the time delay then allowed a series of shots to be captured that appear to be single frames from a single video.