A colleague of mine from university used to study various things using a C4 rotating mirror camera that was originally designed to film atomic explosions. The film is in a circle around a centrally located rotating mirror. Between the film and the mirror is a barrier with 140 lenses, and another barrier with 140 slits. As the image gets flung around by the mirror it's mostly projected onto the barrier with the slits, but sometimes falls on the slit. There it goes through the associated lens and gets focused on the film.

The camera takes 140 photos in a millisecond, giving a 7 micro-second inter-frame time. The experiment is done in complete darkness, and is set to trigger a flash of less than 1 milli-second. The camera has to be loaded and unloaded by feel in complete darkness.

The camera itself runs at a pretty high vacuum to allow the mirror to be reasonably large and spin at 60,000 rpm. The flash has to be pretty bright, and is fed by a 0.5 farad capacitor charged to about 10,000 volts.

The whole setup has to be driven from outside the room for safety reasons, but you don't want to be in there when the flash goes off. You can see it though the wooden door, and the room is noticeably warmer afterwards.

It's pretty cool.

Edit: Found a photo of it:

http://www.smf.phy.cam.ac.uk/fsp/Equipment/Cameras.html