High-speed photography is generally concerned with exposure times shorter than about 1/1,000 second (one millisecond) and often exposures shorter than 1/1,000,000 second (one microsecond). This field partly overlaps that of high-speed cinematography—sequences of very short

Motion pictures have also been used to study phenomena that occur so fast that they cannot be recorded on normal cameras. An immense amount of ingenuity has been applied to the solution of many problems in this field.