A Very Good Reason to Shoot Macro/Micro

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Ken Ramos
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A Very Good Reason to Shoot Macro/Micro

Post by Ken Ramos »

Photographer speared through leg by javelin

You know that is got to hurt! :shock:

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

And the guy laughed about it, and took the picture himself on the way to the hospital. :shock: Do not mess with an ex-Marine!

--Rik

Erland R.N.
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Post by Erland R.N. »

I can tell you that I walked into a tree on saturday, just after jumping over some deep muddy waters. Not sure what could have happened if I had been knocked unconsioness (hmm spelling) and fell into the water.

Now 96 hours later my head looks better :D

I must say that this guy was extremely lucky that the javelin more or less only passed through his skin and did not damage vital parts.

Hey, the guy throwing still won the competition :D

Charles Krebs
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Post by Charles Krebs »

It's just amazing how often critical things in life can turn on just a matter of inches or fraction of a second...

Check out this short "traffic-cam" video a friend sent me today...
You'll wind up watching this at least 3 or 4 times, if not more.

(1.9mb video file)
http://www.krebsmicro.com/forumpix/Intersection.mpg

augusthouse
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Post by augusthouse »

Whoa!

He touches his brakes once and just misses the rear-end of the white sedan. Then puts the hammer down when he's through the lights after avoiding the pole on the corner. The driver of the black 4WD was on-the-ball. What are the odds of that! Look at the traffic lights - am I seeing two lights on - red and green? In Australia that means stop and go, he decided to go!

Maybe this was the guy who threw the javelin?
To use a classic quote from 'Antz' - "I almost know exactly what I'm doing!"

Charles Krebs
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Post by Charles Krebs »

Craig,

It's very interesting if you have a program like VirtualDub (free!) where you can step through it frame by frame, and even enlarge it if you wish. (You can feel like one of those detectives on TV examining the security tape! :wink: )

You can see the guy is fully on the brakes by frame 148. If the the person riding the bike across the intersection at the beginning had spent 2.3 seconds longer at breakfast they would still be looking for the pieces. I was trying to see if there was any contact with the dark SUV. Things are getting mighty close in frames 161-162. There appears to be a red colored object at the front/right of the SUV in frames 167-168,... left rear tail-light flying through the air? Frame 145 is particularly interesting in that you can clearly see an electronic flash go off at the top of a pole on the other side of the intersection (upper left side of frame) just as the car enters the intersection. He didn't stop and sped away, but something tells me this guy had some serious explaining to do!

All in all some very lucky people.

Ken Ramos
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Post by Ken Ramos »

Seems as though I saw something fly off the car also as it crossed infront of the SUV. Betch'a this guy was running from something. :wink: I seen a video a long while back of something similar, where a small car ran a light and ended up wedged beneath the trailer of an 18 wheeler. Not pretty... :roll:

lauriek
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Post by lauriek »

Holy Cow! Seen that a few times in films, but that's obviously carefully choreographed and timed, never seen anyone do it in real life before! Lucky that black SUV driver was really on the ball there, nice piece of braking and avoidance!!

Harold Gough
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Re: A Very Good Reason to Shoot Macro/Micro

Post by Harold Gough »

Ken Ramos wrote: Photographer speared through leg by javelin

Photographer? More likely a confused footballer with a camera! :D

Harold
My images are a medium for sharing some of my experiences: they are not me.

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

There's a cable channel that shows what seems like hour after hour of this stuff, captured by fixed surveillance cameras and police cars in hot pursuit. I don't watch hour after hour, mind you O:) , but I do admit to channel surfing sometimes, and that program turns up memorably often.

A surprising number of the video sequences do not end in disaster, only in minor scrapes like this one. But they always look to me like blind luck -- the event was over before anybody really had a chance to react.

In this one, the black SUV does seem to possibly have had some role in its own survival. Comparing its position with that of the white car in the next lane over, it looks like the black SUV drops back by a few inches, certainly no more than a foot, just before the speeding car goes through. That could be the difference between no contact, or a scrape, or getting knocked into the next lane over (which doesn't happen).

It's still mostly luck, though. Maybe completely luck. Watching the front of the black SUV, I don't see heavy braking -- as indicated by both front end drop and position change with respect to the other cars -- until a full 10 frames (1/3 second) after the speeding car goes past. That's also 15 frames after the brake lights go on, and 23 frames after the speeding car enters the intersection -- 3/4 second, very consistent with normal reaction times. Despite the driver's attentiveness, the whole thing was over before the SUV had a chance to do much.

BTW, another good tool for this sort of analysis is Imagen. In addition to handling video files, it works nicely with image sequences like stacks of jpegs, and it has options to shrink oversized images or to XY scroll within them while also using a time slider to navigate through the sequence. Maybe VirtualDub does these things too -- I just ran into Imagen first.

Oddly enough, the frame numbering seems to be different between Imagen and VirtualDub. As reported by Imagen, the flash happens at frame 147, not the frame 145 that Charlie mentions. There's also some sort of glitch in Imagen's frame numbering. On first pass from a rewind, the flash happens at 146, but when I go back and forth across it, it's at 147, until I rewind all the way and go forward again.

--Rik

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