The identification of the mechanical behaviour of materials at high strain rates is still an open problem. One of the reasons is that at such strain rates, homogeneous stress and strain states are extremely difficult to obtain so that the usual identification procedures do not apply. In particular, loads are very challenging to measure because of inertia effects causing ringing in standard load cells. This is the reason of the use of the very well established Split Hopkinson Pressure Bar (SHPB) set-up which enables to extract global stress strain curves but under very restrictive assumptions. Thanks to the recent development of ultra-high speed imaging systems, it is now possible to study the strain distribution in high rate applications by adapting full-field measurement techniques used in quasi-static situations. This work proposes an attempt to record strain fields at speeds up to 500,000 frames per second (fps) with the grid method and use the data to identify the composite stiffness components with the Virtual Fields Method. It is exploratory in nature as a contribution to defining future innovative test procedures based on data-rich experiments.