stills of a golf ball in motion

andnowimbroke -- Like others above have mentioned, this will be primarily a flash and trigger problem...not necessarily a shutter speed problem...depending on the specific composition of the photo that you're wanting to capture.


Are you looking for something like Doc Edgerton captured? See:


http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/?s=golf#hee-nc-35006


or something more like a full-bodied golfer hitting the ball at just the right moment:


http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/?s=golf#hee-nc-38111


For your school project, I would recommend studying Edgerton's notebooks that are online at the same site as the links above.





As for making your own photos, there are a lots of circuit designs available to trigger flashes with external events. If you're not up to the soldering and circuit board layout, there are also commercially available units that give a turn-key solution.





See for example:


http://www.cognisys-inc.com


another company that offers some of these triggers is:


http://www.bmumford.com/photo/camctlr.html





Hope this helps!

Geoff, those examples are great! 1/50,000 though. Ouch. I'm not real good at circuit crap, so I might lean towards a turn-key approach. I was thinking I was going to have toput a box at low speed in front of a high powered light source to get a strobe thing going on. I think to much.