Photos of insects in flight, obtained using the old HDD

Photographer Linden Gledhill is keen on macro photography of small natural objects - snowflakes, flowers, insects. One of the most technically difficult types of such macro photography is the shooting of insects in flight. In order to catch the insect at the right moment, it is not enough human reaction - you have to use laser or infrared detectors, which are triggered when the insect blocks the laser beams intersecting at the focal point. Not enough and the shutter speed of the camera itself, which at best ranges from 50 to 100 milliseconds, so the photos are taken only with a flash - in a dark room, with a constantly open shutter, or using a high-speed external shutter that prevents illumination from surrounding light sources .

All this equipment costs a lot of money, for example , such a detector system costs $ 350, and gates with a response rate of several hundred microseconds to ten milliseconds are sold for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Gledhill was able to save a lot by using an old hard drive as a high-speed external shutter.

According to its mechanical characteristics, the HDD head unit is an ideal candidate for the drive of a high-speed shutter. The working stroke of the heads is several tens of millimeters, and the maximum positioning time, which is nothing more than the time in which the heads move from one extreme position to another, is about 10 milliseconds. Having disassembled a faulty hard drive and attaching a thin metal plate to the head unit, Linden Gledhill received an external shutter, almost no way inferior to proprietary samples - almost free of charge. Here's what it looks like:
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But the general view of its installation:



The idea of ​​creating a shutter from the old HDD and the connection scheme Gledhill learned from a work published by Australian scientists from the University of Melbourne ( PDF ). Gladhill's photo album of insect photos on Flickr counts almost five hundred images.