Rods in Abundance

Motivation

This article was written to show how Roswell Rods can easily be created and photographed.

Disclaimer

Building a Rod

Here we have a very long rod. I don't think I saw any pictures on the site quite of this calibre.

So, how are these images generated? It's actually quite easy. Have a dark background and a bright, swirly object, preferably in the sun. Preferably it should be a bug, but if it's only 5 degrees above freezing as it was here, a paper swirly will do, as shown on the right. Then just drop the swirly (or shoot the bug) a few times. 1/8s or longer is a nice exposure time for a swirly. For a bug, 1/60s is often enough, as it will flap its wings that much faster.

To build a paper swirley, take a piece of paper, preferable a page from a Dilbert calendar (to remind you of stupidity in all its forms). Cut it approximately to the following Y-shape. Tape some cardboard pieces to the bottom end to give it proper weight (the magenta parts). Then bend the other wing towards you (not shown in the picture) and the other one to the other direction. There, now you have it. When you drop the thing, it should fall swirling.

For more interesting pictures, I chose to rotate them 90 degrees to get horizontal rods. The swirly naturally drops vertically.

This is a picture of a deluxe swirly with two pairs of wings. Vecause of the extra wings, the patterns are more complex. Exposure time is 1/4 s.

This is the deluxe model shot at 1/500 s without rotating the picture and without cutting the black blanket on the background. As you may see, even with this shutter speed there is an ever so slight amount of motion blur.

Coloured Rods

This shows the coloured rod, but as you can see, there is more detail in this picture.

The colours were achieved, of course, by colouring the swirly a bit before dropping it.

Here is the setup I used for shooting swirlie-rods. As can be imagined, timing is of essence when shooting the damn things, especially if you are doing it alone using a time-delayed shot. So prepare to take a kadzillion shots, and preferably use a digital camera so that you can see when you can stop.

Taking rod pictures inside was of course a nice excercise. However, the ultimate test would be to take even better pictures outside, this time using the sun to further highlight the rods.

Taking Rods Outside (Shooting Kosh)

How was this picture taken? First, the car was driven to the shadow, however in such a way that there is sunlight between the camera and the car. Exposure time is set to 1/13s and aperture to the smallest possible, in this case 8.0. The very small aperture will have the effect of making field of depth perfect from half a meter to infinity. Zoom is used to even further blur distances. Now, the swirly is dropped in the sunshine. Sunshine is an important element because if everything is in the shadows, and the swirly is the only thing lit by direct sunlight, it will register much brighter and more interesting (see the tentacles at the bottom side), much like ambassador Kosh as seen in the episode Falling Toward Apotheosis of Babylon 5. As a side effect of the camera lens being in sunshine, though, dust speckles on the lens show as spirit blobs. This could be avoided by protecting the lens from direct sunlight, but for this particular case I found the spirit creature to fit in just fine.

Here is yet another rod, which has, as the one in the previous picture, again with a detailed tail structure (or are they its feet? tentacles?). This one looks more like Kosh's angelic form in The Fall of Night.

This is the original picture of Emma dropping the swirly, of which the previous picture was a partial enlargement.

Because of a slight wind, the rod is a little bit to the left of Emma.

This is how exciting a rod will look with a 1/640s exposure time. The rod, which is very much in the same location as in the picture before, doesn't look at all that exciting anymore.

Dr. Bruce Maccabee's Rod Analysis

"Although the well-known frame rate for video is 30 per second, the picture can be created in much less than 1/30 sec. In this case the time to create one video "field," which shows the whole scene in front of the camera, was 1/2000 of a second. The video camera was operated with a short shutter time to "stop" the motion of the falling base jumper. That is, the shutter time was short enough so that the image of the base jumper was not smeared by his own motion (downward) during the time that a complete complete "field" was generated by the camera electronics."

I'm not going deeper to the mundane facts that video fields lasts for 1/60 s and that the quoted figure of 1/30 s has little relevance when talking about temporal video resolution. Neither am I going to have lengthy discussions of the fact that the SI shorthand for second is "s", not "sec". But, the claim that the pictures shown at the sight is shot at 1/2000 s instead of 1/60 s, is completely bogus.

Let's take a look at the very first picture on the page (go on, click the link above and then come back. Shoo!). Yes, as Dr. Maccabee said, the jumper doesn't suffer from a lot of motion blur. But - and here comes a most important point - look at the rock above the jumper. The rock is clearly (motion) blurred! So, what has happened? The video camera operator has followed the movement of the jumper, which has had the effect of showing motion blur of the rocks behind him. This is basic, and the fact that Dr. Maccabee has failed to notice this invalidates the rest of the article, since it's based on the incorrect assumption that a short exposure time makes it impossible for the rod in the picture to be an insect.

Notice, by the way, how this picture is exactly as I said a good rod picture should be: the main object of the picture is in the shadows, but the guy shooting is on the top of a ledge, almost certainly in sunshine, where insects have great chances to register as rods.

Addendum to Rod Analysis