Over the years, while introducing the concept of what strip and streak camera are all about, I relied on starting the discussion with the fundamental difference in the process by which leaf and focal plane shutters expose film in a camera. The point was to draw upon a clear understanding of the difference between an instantaneous and everywhere simultaneous exposure associated with a leaf shutter and the piecemeal, sequential, nature of an exposure associated with a focal plane shutter. This principle then leads one to examine systems where the slit in the camera remains stationary while the image of a subject also remains stationary and possibly simply changes in brightness or which moves along and over the slit while the film below is also in motion. Generally streak cameras are of very little interest to the average photographic audience and my major effort in the past was devoted to exploring situations where the image of the subject also moves across the exposing slit. In spite of the numerous applications for strip cameras, the streak version is often ignored because the images it delivers are not really pictures that look like a scene as perceived by a photographer or others.
Streak cameras deliver just that.
These streaks stand for or are intimately related to time. The illustration to the left shows what the linear array looked like once installed into the camera body. As you can see it resembles a slit at the film plane of a film type camera. To demonstarte the timing capability of streak cameras, for the first example I chose to show how the exposure time of a camera shutter's can be measured. These times, generally less than a second in duration, are difficult to measure without specialized equipment.