There’s no shortage of slow-motion footage out there on the internet, but there is a shortage of original ideas. Slo-mo explosions just don’t hold our attention like they used to, but by attaching his high-speed camera to a spinning lawnmower blade, YouTube’s tesla500 gives us a fantastic front-row seat as old electronics get shredded and destroyed.
The biggest challenges of mounting a Chronos 1.4 high-speed camera to this inverted lawnmower’s blade, which can hit speeds of up to 1,800 RPM, was keeping everything perfectly balanced so that the rig didn’t dangerously wobble, and finding a lens that didn’t distort and lose focus at G-forces higher than 200Gs. In the end, a 2.8-millimetre prime lens worked perfectly, capturing some of the most satisfying high-speed destruction footage we’ve seen in years.