Mirror Image

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I fell down the eBay rabbit hole earlier, searching for more bargain bundles of old photographic kit, more often than not stumbling on little piles of crap for too much money; stuff that back in the day was the stock in trade of the less serious end of photographic retail: worth little then and worth-less now. Anyhow, in searching for Alice amongst the dross, I came upon a Soviet era 16mm high-speed cine camera, one "SKS-1M-16", which looked rather familiar to me as it was a straight clone of a Fastax that we used to use  when I worked in Mech. Eng. at Brum University all those years ago [blog posts passim].

You can see the exact similarity from the eBay pic on the right, compared to the picture from my old Focal Press textbook on High Speed Photography [left]. The only real difference is above the viewfinder on the Fastax, which has an extra port for overlaying extra data on the film as you record the event itself. These cameras had a revolving prism shutter and the film was exposed at the rate of ten-thousand frames per second, ripping through fifty feet of film in a second and shredding the last few feet of film in the process. 

Replayed at normal frame rate, this gave a super-slo-mo rendering of whatever physical process one needed to analyse. Film cameras remained top dog in this field well into the digital era, owing to superior resolution at any given frame rate, only relatively recently being consigned to the department of curiosities as modern tech played catch-up. Great pieces of engineering, though...

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