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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).
Images: Wasps in flight. Credit: Flickr/Linden Gledhill (top pane, bottom pane).All images © Linden Gledhill.
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