Quote Originally Posted by neuroanatomist View Post
@ChadS - I think Bob is trying to eliminate wing blur. I'm guessing that Bob mis-typed in his post - he didn't mean "1/64th of a second," he meant 1/64 flash power setting. That's the minimum power setting for the flash. Capacitor-driven strobes don't have variable intensities - when they're on, they're on at 100%; when you use lower power, what you're getting is shorter duration of light - that's needed to eliminate the wing blur (the duration of a full-power flash is too long). So, to overcome ambient light but still maintain the shortest possible flash duration, you need more flashes.
Thanks Neuro that makes total sense to me. (it would help to know that one of the projects I'm working on is imaging 10 micron particles moving at 100 m/s with micron resolution). What's the time frame of a full strobe? How repeatable is the interval at 1/64 does anyone know? I ask because LEDs can be switched at 1-10 microsecond speeds quite easily (1-10/1,000,000). An array of them soft-box-sized and aimed at the feeder should do the trick. The trick is getting them all to turn on (and off) at the same time. However, this is not really that hard to do.