“He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul’s estate.” – Henry David Thoreau, Journal, February 11, 1840

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Dogs Drinking Slowly

If you read my previous post, you know that I brought a high-speed camera home with me this weekend. This morning, I took some movies of the dogs drinking from their water bowl. It is pretty fascinating to see how they roll their tongue back to create a large surface area on the water, dip it into the water, pull it up slowly, then gulp the water they’ve pulled up from the bowl. Here are three movies of three of the dogs.

All movies were shot with a Vision Research Phantom V7.1 color high-speed digital camera. I was using a Sigma 24-70mm F-mount lens. All movies were shot at f/4. I used two 250W Northstar lights. The movie of Sailor is in super slow-motion, at least compared to the other two. It was shot at 1000 frames-per-second with a 100 microsecond exposure time. You’ll notice that it is a little washed-out. That is because it was dark, so I tried to lighten it up some by adjusting the brightness and contrast after the fact. I’m not very good at this stuff yet, so the pictures aren’t as good as a pro could get them, but you can sure see the act of drinking!

Update: I uploaded a new movie of Sailor that is exactly 1000 frames long. This means that everything you see in this movie occured in 1 second in “real life”. I count three full slurps of water in 1 second!

For the movies of Daisy and Bode, I changed the frame rate to 500 frames-per-second (so they move along a little faster). And, the exposure to 200 microseconds, giving me a little more light to work with. Now, you can see that I have some parts of the scene (the white on the dog, for example) that are overexposed. I could have fixed this in the camera if I had been paying more attention. (A feature called Extreme Dynamic Range). But, they are what they are from a quality perspective. I’m learning and will get better!

The movies are in Quicktime format using the h.264 codec. If you can’t view the movies, download and install the latest version of Quicktime from www.apple.com/quicktime. And, they are about 32MB in size, so give them some time to load.

Hope you enjoy!

Sailor Drinking (21MB)

Daisy Drinking (25MB)

Bode Drinking (31MB)

Tags:  videodogshigh-speed
Posted under: Dog StuffStuff You Gotta Know! • by Rick on 07/04/2006 at 08:13 AM
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