Milkdrops
From the youngest age, I've always loved that photography has the ability to slow down and even stop time. I remember a grade-school field trip to the MIT Edgerton Center, where we learned about Harold "Doc" Edgerton's experiments in strobe photography. I thought the photos of the milkdrop and the bullet going through the apple were the most amazing thing and yearned to one day recreate them myself.
Ten years later, at the age of 16, I finally made the investment and purchased my first DSLR. I immediately decided that I would use it for some fun experimental photography. So, I started sketching, and I designed a circuit that would fire a flash strobe when triggered by either a loud sound or by an object crossing through the beam path of a laser pointer. Using the latter, I was able to set up a eye-dropper of milk above a black dinner plate such that the milk would break the laser's beam as it fell, and that would fire the flash. For the flash, I didn't have the money for a nice DSLR external flash / Speedlight, so I hacked a disposable camera and soldered wires to its flash contacts.
With the lights in my basement workshop turned off, the shutter to my camera held open, and the camera flash aimed at my makeshift paper-towel soft-box, I began squeezing drops of milk onto the plate. With each drop, I would be blinded by the flash for a moment and then eagerly check the DSLRs display to see what I had captured. After a handful of tries and various adjustments to the system, I was able to get some beautiful results.
