High speed cameras can be great fun. I worked as an engineer in a factory that produced high speed packaging machinery. Sometimes, the only way to figure out what was causing malfunctions at high speeds is to film it with a high speed camera. Then, you can see exactly what was happening in slow motion, and correct it. So, we convinced the company to purchase one for the engineering dept. At some point, I decided it would be great to film someone sneezing, and see it in slow motion. It took us weeks to finally capture one on camera. So there were several weeks of people running into the engineering to report that they felt a sneeze coming on, or to report that someone else was about to sneeze. We finally found someone who volunteered to use dust or pepper to induce a sneeze. The end result was amazing and disgusting at the same time.

As time went by, people started taking it home to find something cool to film in slow motion, and present it to us on Monday mornings. We went through the usual smashing of various produce, and graduated to more complex shots. One Monday, one of the gun nut engineers came in with a small scratch on the top of the camera that was caused by it being grazed with a bullet, and we had to enforce a strict no firearms policy after that (since it never should have been leaving the building anyway).

We had a decent collection of various slow motion shots of a wide variety of things, and I am sure that there were some things filmed that were never shared with us, since it was in the hands of fairly young, single guys on many weekends. It was inevitable that there were some sort of adult antics filmed with the camera, but thankfully, no one was ever comfortable enough with us to share shots of his junk in action. That camera ended up racking up 3x more off the books usage than legitimate company usage. Since it was leased equipment, there were usage reports generated by the leasing company each quarter, and management was impressed that we were able to utilize it way more than they anticipated we would. If they only knew...