“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 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 daughter, 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).

Authors: Dave Mosher

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