Slo-Mo

My friend Mark Wilson over at the tech blog Gizmodo has a nice basic primer explaining slow-motion, along with sample clips of various frame rates. Here's tip 1:

1. Use Lots of Light
When you shoot slow mo, you are taking pictures quickly. And when you take pictures quickly, light has less time to create an image in your camera. Shoot in plenty of light, or you will get dark and gloomy slow-mo.

In real terms, that means that super high-speed shooting might not work indoors. On the Casio EX-F1, for instance, you can shoot 300fps indoors, and maybe 600fps if you're near a window, but you can't pull off its 1200fps setting without adding bright light. For the same reason, night shooting may very well be out of the question, depending on your particular rig and just what you expect from the image in terms of detail—artsy stuff may be fine, but don't expect to film a hummingbird under the soft glow of the moon.