Not terribly fast. If this guy just fell 1/2 meter off the boat, he's traveling at 490cm/s when he hits the water. I can't tell how much blur there is in the image, but if there's 1/2cm of blur that means his shutter is around 1/1000sec shutter which is well within the capability of even old and crappy cameras.
Now, if you want to do fancy high-speed photography with crappy cameras, do it in the dark and use a flash. A camera flash is orders of magnitude shorter than a shutter, and can freeze some truly amazing details.
What tongodeon said, mostly. Except that a 1/2 metre drop would mean the guy was doing about 3.1 metres/sec when he reached the water (from distance = 0.5 * {acceleration} * {time}^2, for constant acceleration).
Photography and subject movement have become a source of some interest to me of late. In the past, I did a lot of motorsport photography. Competition cars are fast-moving objects, but (if you ignore wheels, spraying dust or water...) they move in a uniform fashion. Thus, it is an easy matter to pan the camera to compensate for the movement: target is sharp, background gets blurry, but it would probably be out of focus anyway, and the horizontal streaks add to the sense of speed and drama. No problem, even in poor light.
Now, I take a lot of wildlife photographs, mostly of birds. Birds on the ground are fairly slow-moving objects, so shutter speed isn't an issue, right? Wrong. Most of the bird is slow moving. If the bird is feeding (or singing), however, parts of the bird are moving at high speed over short distances. Rapid, non-uniform movement, so there is no way to compensate, short of faster shutter speeds. The result is that I have taken numerous photographs where most of the bird is 'frozen' and the head or the bill is just a blur of motion (one of these avocets is demonstrating a mild case of the blurry bill effect). Short of increasing the power of the sun, or somehow getting close enough to use a flash, I'm not sure what to do about this.
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Back of the envelope
Now, if you want to do fancy high-speed photography with crappy cameras, do it in the dark and use a flash. A camera flash is orders of magnitude shorter than a shutter, and can freeze some truly amazing details.
Re: Back of the envelope
Photography and subject movement have become a source of some interest to me of late. In the past, I did a lot of motorsport photography. Competition cars are fast-moving objects, but (if you ignore wheels, spraying dust or water...) they move in a uniform fashion. Thus, it is an easy matter to pan the camera to compensate for the movement: target is sharp, background gets blurry, but it would probably be out of focus anyway, and the horizontal streaks add to the sense of speed and drama. No problem, even in poor light.
Now, I take a lot of wildlife photographs, mostly of birds. Birds on the ground are fairly slow-moving objects, so shutter speed isn't an issue, right? Wrong. Most of the bird is slow moving. If the bird is feeding (or singing), however, parts of the bird are moving at high speed over short distances. Rapid, non-uniform movement, so there is no way to compensate, short of faster shutter speeds. The result is that I have taken numerous photographs where most of the bird is 'frozen' and the head or the bill is just a blur of motion (one of these avocets is demonstrating a mild case of the blurry bill effect). Short of increasing the power of the sun, or somehow getting close enough to use a flash, I'm not sure what to do about this.