Although his original goal was to display and study the stresses on moving machine parts otherwise invisible to the naked eye Edgerton later used very short flashes of light as a means of producing dramatic still photographs of fast-moving objects in transit. such as bullets in flight, hovering hummingbirds, and falling milk drop splashing into a bowl. His camera had no shutter. The film was pulled through continuously as in motion picture cameras but at much higher exposed by speeds a stroboscopic flash lasting ,000,000 of a second or less