Don't blink

January 16, 2006 7:28 AM

A fantastic gallery of perfectly timed photos, and a more detailed treatment of the phenomenon. [via Ursi and itinerate surfer]
posted by 31d1 (24 comments total)

... is that really someone holding objects centimeters away from the path of a bullet? I'm sure the trajectory is perfectly aimed... but that still freaks me out.
posted by thanatogenous at 7:48 AM on January 16, 2006

same thing I was wondering!

Thats why we need guns in the UK. Too shoot fruits with!
posted by 13twelve at 7:50 AM on January 16, 2006

This is a bullet passing through Jell-O, am I right?
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:58 AM on January 16, 2006

Too shoot fruits with by half.

Bullets to high-speed macro photo gorgeousness is the new swords to ploughshares.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 8:03 AM on January 16, 2006

I think it's a pellet gun.
posted by 31d1 at 8:04 AM on January 16, 2006

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure most/all of those bullets are .177 caliber air rifle pellets. Yeah, that's Jell-O. The pre-made stuff in a cup.

I bet most of those photos were shot with an open or long shutter with a sound or triggered strobe-flash with precise time delays.
posted by loquacious at 8:04 AM on January 16, 2006

See also this thread on high speed photography on flickr.
posted by slimepuppy at 8:07 AM on January 16, 2006

Wowsers. The smashing eggs are especially pretty.
posted by jack_mo at 8:07 AM on January 16, 2006

I bet most of those photos were shot with an open or long shutter with a sound or triggered strobe-flash with precise time delays.

Yeah, that's how almost all of it is done IIRC. It's a hell of a lot easier to trigger a flashbulb at a precise moment than it is to get a camera's shutter to snap that fast. Heh.

Man. This makes me want to clear out the garage and set up a nice little high-speed photography workbench.
posted by verb at 8:08 AM on January 16, 2006

That should, of course, be:
This thread ON metafilter about highspeed photography on flickr.
posted by slimepuppy at 8:08 AM on January 16, 2006

Awesome, I can never get enough of this kind of stuff - thanks for the link!
posted by jonson at 8:15 AM on January 16, 2006

I've seen most of those images elsewhere, did Ivan Minic just collect them all in one place? Is that copyright kosher? Does anyone care? probably not
posted by dabitch at 8:19 AM on January 16, 2006

I'm also fascinated by the second link. I'm halfway through the article and can't really see how it relates to the pictures in the first link. Unless the claim by 31d1 is that they're using video in the first series (which has not yet been mentioned in the comments).
posted by bigmike at 8:24 AM on January 16, 2006

Nah, the only relation I claim is cool high-speed images. I could have worded the post better I guess.
posted by 31d1 at 8:35 AM on January 16, 2006

What did the fruit and jello and eggs ever do to this guy? Why's he gotta go and shoot them? Poor eggs.
posted by Richat at 8:44 AM on January 16, 2006

A friend of mine got a 36,000 fps high-speed camera a while back. It was pretty damn cool.

If you get tired of looking at splashes, bullets, and breaking glasses, try the following:

Check out these cool "popping water balloon" images.

Tech Imaging has cool photos, including a golf ball getting hit off the tee.

Also see water balloons bursting in low gravity.
posted by fuerloins at 9:03 AM on January 16, 2006

posted by LordSludge at 9:15 AM on January 16, 2006

Cool photos.

The current make has an article on how to do this here. They use a high-speed flash with the camera set to longer exposure/large appature. The linked pictures could possibly have been taken with make's technique.
posted by bonehead at 9:19 AM on January 16, 2006

Pretty awesome photos. I only wish they'd invested in a new sledgehammer for those early shots up top. Still amazing stuff though.
posted by fenriq at 10:46 AM on January 16, 2006

Birds in Flight. R.W. Scott goes into a fair amount of detail about his setup. (It's trickier since you're not controlling the birds, of course..)

The MIT museum has a really neat exhibit on Harold Edgerton's photography if you're ever in the neighborhood.
posted by Marit at 11:07 AM on January 16, 2006

I worked at a research facility that did some high speed imaging of instantious flows like these photos. They used a high resolution, high frame rate camcorder so it didn't need to be triggered at the exact moment. I'm guessing that's what these were done with too, to trigger the camera at the exact right moment would be very difficult and possible more expensive to get it right than just using a video recorder.
posted by klik99 at 12:10 PM on January 16, 2006

I'm too lazy to find where its at, but I'm pretty sure somewhere in the land of flickr the people say that the hand is a fake one that adds a nice touch to their pictures. Also on a lot of the ones in the first link (at least for the ones that are the same from the previous Mefi link) they are long exposures that use a microphone or light diode to trigger a flash. That would be the method that bonehead linked to.
posted by Phantomx at 1:19 PM on January 16, 2006

Pretty cool, and thanks - it's good to see stuff like this every once in a while, but really, there's nothing new in the flickr thing. Edgerton and a few other guys did this to death when high speed photography became easy to do.

The American Scientist article is cool, but even in one of their figures it shows a bullet in flight with the cool shockwave effect, and it was taken in 1880!

I don't mean to devalue the post, it's just that this has been going on for a long, long time and I kind of wonder why people still do it.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 4:09 PM on January 16, 2006

BlackLeotardFront - From the American Scientist article

"Because these tools and the study of ballistics and explosions are over a century old, it may be hard to picture what could renew interest in them. In addition to the current need for counter-terrorism measures mentioned earlier, investigators also now have modern electronic high-speed cameras with which to capture transient explosive events and fast-moving shock waves. Sadly for some of us, the era of photographic film is almost over. However, with its demise, the rather painful methods of high-speed cinematography are being replaced with high-speed videography, which has an ever-improving frame rate and resolution and comparatively magnificent user-friendliness, as well as compact and robust packaging. This allows the simpler optical methods, such as shadowgraphy, to break out of the laboratory and take to the field, where one can accomplish high-speed imaging of shock waves at an unprecedented scale. Coupled with the utility of small (gram-range) explosive charges, which are used for safety and convenience in research, this technology opens new vistas in the study of shock waves and explosions."

I think that pretty much sums it up, its easier, and you can carry pocketfuls of explosives to blow stuff up with and film out in the field... if you don't understand that I'm sorry.
posted by sourbrew at 6:50 PM on January 16, 2006