Ask any person with working eyes and they’ll tell you everything is more interesting in slow motion. Be it Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix, watching two bricks of solid titanium get welded together, or seeing an iMac succumb to a 9mm armor-piercing round, even the most mundane activities can be cooler when viewed through the lens of a rapid-fire, slow-mo camera.
Case in point: these splashes and explosions of color, captured in slow-motion by YouTube channel Macro Room, show the beauty of fluid dynamics. Using a rotating 950 fps slow-motion camera set above a circular base, they were able to capture various objects as they were dropped, submerged, and covered in different colored dyes, paints, and powders.
Highlights of the video include dropping clear balls into glasses filled with different colored liquids. Using a clamp mechanism to suspend the ball in mid-air, they first rotate the camera (not the base!) at high speed so it completely captures the drop. Once the camera reaches its max velocity, a switch is triggered dropping the ball into the container below.
Some examples:
The result is less mess and more beauty in the symmetry, shadows, light, bubbles, and mix of color worthy of
Another experiment they manage to capture in slow-mo is the dropping of dyes onto submerged objects. After placing a flower and skull into separate glass containers filled with water, they drop a small dye balloon which pops upon contact and sends color throughout the whole container. While the naked eye can barely glimpse the object mid-explosion, the slow-motion camera manages to stretch that split second so you can fully appreciate it.
They also do some experiments with submerged dye balloons. After dropping a pin into the water container and making contact, the balloon promptly bursts into a bevy of blue and green colors (it even looks like it has circular clusters of color popping out in those initial bursts).
The second experiment involves three dye-filled water balloons and a very pointy toy airplane. Starting its decent off-screen, the plane blasts its way through all the balloons at once, leaving three suspended globs of liquid which look nearly solid when frozen mid-frame.
If you’re a sucker for videos with awesome camerawork, the Macro Room YouTube
