How is it possible to take pictures at billions of frames every second?

We put this question to Bill Proud:

Well number one, you need a very intense bright light source. Some people actually use explosives to do the lighting for the system! The next thing you need is a thing called a CCD, Charge Capture Device, or CMOS camera. What you're doing is switching on high voltages, in and out very, very quickly. So it's high voltage pulses on a nanosecond duration with explosive as the lighting. These can be quite destructive experiments, even if you're doing quite small scale experiments.