Fast Lanes
By:
August 24, 2010
Things are happening inside of things, whole histories borne upwards and bursting on a rising tide of moments.
Take hummingbirds, for instance. These lapidary blurs are a summer joy, buzzing the trumpet vines and feeders, flashing in the sun. But there’s a lot more going on in their high-velocity lives. Captured on film at 200–500 frames per second, they reveal themselves fighting, hunting, and struggling to survive — all of it faster than we can perceive without the help of high-speed cinematography. At these speeds, video and film are like phenomenological prostheses carrying us to places outside our reckoning.
And if you crank up the frame rate by another order of magnitude, a whole new realm of acts and things is revealed. The lightning strike captured below was filmed at nine thousand frames per second. Spreading out three-tenths of a second across a minute and a half, the video discovers storms within storms, highways of fire hidden in the sky in the flash of a second.