By day, Linden Gledhill develops pharmaceuticals. After hours, he pushes the limits of high-speed, up-close and on-the-cheap digital photography. The British native's latest science-inspired shots of insects in midflight, splattering paint droplets and butterfly wing scales are made possible by a small photographic-accessories company in Michigan. When Gledhill hits a barrier to his artistic will, he calls up Cognisys co-founder Paul DeZeeuw for help. “Our mission is to help photographers capture what they wouldn’t normally be able to, and for cheap,” DeZeeuw said. Some of the equipment Cognisys sells for a few hundred dollars can cost tens of thousands of dollars from other companies. “My friend and I started this whole thing in a basement, and Linden was one of our first customers. He’s been suggesting features and accessories and all sorts of things since then.” The two have already created a high-speed handheld photography rig and are joining forces on other devices to capture Gledhill’s impossible shots, including a shutter system that can actuate in about 5 milliseconds from pushing the button to recording a photo. That's about 12-13 times faster than systems built into today's consumer digital cameras. “This collaboration has opened up a whole new world for me. It’s enabling me to do professional work,” he said. Despite taking on such professional work — including a recent contract to create images for Canon — Gledhill still describes himself as an amateur. His modesty runs so deep that, if you let him, he attempts to hide his engineering prowess behind soft-spoken statements about overcoming “slight” technical barriers. But this is a man who went out to the garage and built a high-speed camera shutter from an old hard drive when his camera wasn't fast enough to capture images of flying bugs. “My dad was an engineer, mechanical-maintenance kind of guy, so we built things together. But he was also interested in photography, and I picked up the hobby with him,” Gledhill said. “Even in those days, when I was 11 or 12, we built an infrared trigger system for a camera” and a made-from-scratch telescope. Gledhill cultivates his passions from the home he shares with his wife and three children, uploading his work (along with images of his do-it-yourself camera rigs in the living room) to Flickr. We share some of his favorite images here, plus some of the technological magic behind their creation. Images: Wasps in flight. Credit: Flickr/Linden Gledhill (top pane, bottom pane).

Honeybee Gledhill started using Cognisys equipment when he wanted to capture flying insects, such as the honeybee above. “I have a problem with killing them, plus they don’t fly when they’re dead,” Gledhill said. He didn’t want to pay a hefty sum to get the job done, so he picked up StopShot in 2008. The unit designed by DeZeeuw is made of a laser-based sensor hooked up to a timing computer, which then plugs into a digital SLR camera. When the beam is broken, it instantly instructs the camera to take a picture. “A flying insect is in your field of view for maybe 10 milliseconds. That’s way too fast for human systems to respond,” DeZeeuw said. “That’s why we use electronics. It’s a whole lot faster and far less frustrating to capture what you want.” The one-beam StopShot system was good for immobile objects, Gledhill says, but a bug could trigger the camera shutter when off-frame. To resolve the problem, he prototyped a new two-laser unit (below) with Cognisys. It triggers a photograph only when both beams are broken, giving complete control over where a subject appears in a camera’s view. The yellow cylinders attached to the front of the aluminum frame are lasers pointing to mirrors (bottom left, bottom right), ultimately guiding the beams to receiving sensors within the frame. When both beams are simultaneously broken, the computer triggers the camera (center) as well as any attached flash units (right, left). One has to wonder how many times Gledhill gets stung while taking photos only a few inches away from wasp and bee nests. The dual-beam StopShot system is programmable and more or less fully automated, however, allowing “hundreds of images” to be taken while he’s watching from a safe distance. Images: Flickr/Linden Gledhill (top pane, bottom pane)

Fruit Flies Leave sweet or sour food to fester on a warm day, and chances are tiny fruit flies will flock to it like miners to a gold rush. Gledhill used his custom dual-beam rig to create the above composite. “I’ve been pushing the boundaries of StopShot’s sensitivity, and it’s a very fine dot maybe a couple millimeters across,” he said. “It can detect very small objects like fruit flies.” Some of the fastest dSLR cameras have a delay of 60-70 milliseconds, which still wasn’t speedy enough for Gledhill to capture especially fast insects. So he created a high-speed shutter from a hard drive (below) and attached it to the front of his camera, giving his equipment a response time of 11 milliseconds. “The drive’s arm pivots on a coiled magnet, which allows it to move very rapidly with some current. I put a shutter blade onto the arm, made a casing for it, made a power supply and hooked StopShot up to the thing,” Gledhill said. DeZeeuw and Gledhill are now collaborating on a production version of the shutter boasting a mere 6-millisecond delay. Images: Flickr/Linden Gledhill (top pane, bottom pane)

Water Figure on Leaves Another interest of Gledhill’s is capturing the hidden dynamics of liquids. “As soon as a drop hits the water’s surface, you have about 5 milliseconds to react. You could photograph it all day and maybe get a few keeper photos,” DeZeeuw said. Using a high-speed system vastly increases the number of good images a photographer can get, which DeZeeuw says allows more time to focus on the creative process instead of technical limitations. Gledhill captures dancing water and paint with advanced yet surprisingly low-budget setups. At the far right of the rig below is a StopShot computer, which has three input ports for flexibility in triggering photographs. Infrared beams and sensors (grey L-shaped devices, bottom left and middle right) await a falling drop, telling the computer to engage the camera shutter and flash unit (left center) as the liquid splashes upward. Hidden behind three reflectors (center) is a stage where pump-controlled drops of liquid (top) arrive. Everything here (minus the flash unit) costs about $400 and provides “priceless” hours of entertainment, Gledhill says. Images: Flickr/Linden Gledhill (top pane, bottom pane)

Crown Jewels To make this jewel-studded crown, Gledhill used his water-figures rig and a touch of glitter. “It’s a different spin on the classic water-drop crown,” Gledhill said. “This also demonstrates the use of StopShot for triggering flash units based on the position of a falling water drop.” Image: Flickr/Linden Gledhill

Triple Exposure One of Gledhill’s most famous series is his paint-splattered figures, inspired by Flickr user fotoopa’s work. Gledhill makes the images by dribbling paint over a rubber membrane stretched onto a speaker. When he pumps sound through the speaker, the paint shoots upward and a microphone triggers the computer. Adopting a “no Photoshop” approach for this image, Gledhill designed an advanced rig (below) to capture three separate instances of the same splash, spaced 10 milliseconds apart, in a single shot. “A spinning mirror was used to displace the image across the camera sensor while the flash guns were strobed three times,” Gledhill said. A variable resistor controls a DC motor (left), driving the belt around an axle (bottom). On top of the axle is a high-grade mirror. By trial and error, Gledhill tuned the resistor and his flash unit to paint the three evenly spaced images onto his camera’s sensor. Images: Flickr/Linden Gledhill (top pane, bottom pane)

Canon Advertisement Gledhill’s colorful water figures eventually landed him a contract to help Canon with a new Pixma printer advertising campaign. To bring the splashes of color to life in video, he teamed up with design agency Dentsu London and used a 5,400-frames-per-second video camera attached to a rotating platform. (By comparison, a typical video camera captures images at 60 frames per second.) Gledhill says it was an a amazing experience, but finds it even more amazing that amateurs can do similar work “without hundreds of thousands of dollars of extremely heavy equipment.” Video: Vimeo/Dentsu London Image: A water figure. Credit: Flickr/Linden Gledhill

Jumping Spider Another photographic interest of Gledhill’s is capturing images of tiny insects in stunning detail. Taking such shots requires a high-magnification camera setup, including extension tubes and teleconverters to boost a lens’ magnification power. Luck and patience are other necessary ingredients. Image: Flickr/Linden Gledhill

Tobacco Hornworm One serious challenge of shooting objects at high magnification is working with an increasingly limited plane of focus, also called depth-of-field. “Normally you get only a slice of your subject in-focus,” DeZeeuw said. “The rest is fuzzy,” he says, because of the physics of light traveling through a lens with a wide aperture. Using a process called focus stacking, however, photographers can merge digital images to expand their depth of field. Gledhill combined five separate images of the tobacco hornworm (above) to widen the in-focus portion of the image. Image: Flickr/Linden Gledhill

Harlequin Cabbage Bugs Hatching From the underside of a leaf, tiny harlequin cabbage bugs hatch from their hinged egg cases. Gledhill says digital photography allows him to take images the film cameras of his childhood couldn’t. “Film is precious. Now you can take thousands of photos and learn more quickly,” Gledhill said. In addition, the low-light sensitivity of good digital cameras “has gotten to point where it exceeds film,” he said. Image: Flickr/Linden Gledhill

Mold on a Raspberry At 7x magnification, this “alien landscape” of sprouting mold spores looks much less fuzzy. Gledhill used 35 individual shots taken in 40-micron steps to create this photograph. To create similar focus-stacked macrophotography, Gledhill first used a homemade, hand-powered macro rail with a camera mount attached to it. By turning a dial attached to a fine-pitch screw, he nudged his camera closer to tiny subjects and snapped one in-focus slice at a time. After the shoot, he merged the photographs with software. It was tedious work, so Gledhill now uses Cognisys’ StackShot macro rail — another computer-controlled piece of equipment that he pushed DeZeeuw to create. With a bit of programming, its stepping motor can inch a camera along in movements as small as 10 microns. “You’re basically building a master image one slice at a time,” DeZeeuw said. “If you try to go out and get a microscope with [focus] stacking, you’re looking at tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now we can get that capability with several hundred dollars.” Gledhill’s setup (below) uses two StackShot computers to control the vertical and horizontal movement of his camera, lens and flash units. Images: Flickr/Linden Gledhill (top pane, bottom pane)

Peruvian Lily Nectar Using StackShot, Gledhill compiled this image of an Alstroemeria stigma. Tiny grains of pollen, some sprouting tubes to deliver their genetic cargo, are trapped in the nectar dripping off the flower’s female reproductive organ. The shot is composed of 40 separate images taken at 17x magnification. Each image was taken in 20-micron (1/50 millimeter) steps. Image: Flickr/Linden Gledhill

Small Spider It’s not often that a live subject will stay still enough for macrophotography, but this patient spider played her role well for Gledhill. He stacked 10 images at approximately 4.5x magnification to create this photograph. Image: Flickr/Linden Gledhill

Butterfly Wing Scales Gledhill also uses his computer-controlled setup to photograph structures normally hidden to human eyes. The blue and white scales of a butterfly wing in this cropped image made of seven focus-stacked images, for example, pop out in clear detail next to veins. Image: Flickr/Linden Gledhill

Sunset Moth Wing Scales The iridescent scales of a sunset moth’s wing show up in stunning detail, thanks to focus-stacking work by Gledhill. This 17x-magnified image covers a 1.3-millimeter-wide section of the wing. Gledhill says the higher magnification you use, the more physics works against good image quality. “If you want to see the scales on a moth or butterfly wing, you have to stack images,” he said. “It allows you to reduce diffraction and circumvent the natural blur from your optics.” Image: Flickr/Linden Gledhill