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How to photograph a bullet mid air?


12 years 2 months ago #209282 by P51
Will one of those high speed triggers work for something moving this fast? Will my Canon 7D work for this too?

Thanks!
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12 years 2 months ago #209286 by mattmoran
I've never tried it, but it sounds like a fun project.

I would expect the camera to be irrelevant. The trick will be to fire the strobe at the right time. Probably your best bet is to rig something up so the gun and strobe are fired an adjustable amount of time apart, and then play with the delay until you catch the bullet.
-Matt
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12 years 2 months ago #209288 by icepics
edgerton-digital-collections.org/galleries/iconic/bullets

web.mit.edu/Edgerton/
Sharon
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12 years 2 months ago #209332 by Garbo
There's a company below called Cognisys that has a device called Stop Shot, i do believe I saw on their site that this would do what you are looking for
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12 years 2 months ago #209339 by mattmoran
After a couple back of the envelope calculations I'm not so sanguine on this sort of thing working with "off the shelf" equipment.

Even if you use a trigger like Cognisys makes to detect the bullet and fire the strobe, there is a more basic problem.

On most flash units I could find specs for, the duration of the flash is on the order of 1/1000 of a second to 1/5000 of a second, depending on power settings, etc.
Depending on the type of bullet, the speed might be anywhere from 400 feet per second (air gun) to 2800 feet per second (50 cal riffle).
So if you are satisfied with an air gun, and you can get your strobe down to 1/5000 of a second, the bullet will only travel about an inch during the flash. If you want to capture a bullet from a 9mm handgun (1200 ft/sec) then the bullet will travel almost 3 inches during the flash. And for a high power riffle, you are looking at about 6 inches.
Even at an inch, that seems like a lot of blur.

It must be possible to get strobes with shorter duration than camera strobes. You will need one with a duration measured in microseconds instead of milliseconds to freeze a bullet.
-Matt
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12 years 1 month ago #211027 by KenStephens
Harold Edgerton, who invented the strobe, during the Manhattan Project in World War II, had to develop a way to capture events during the nuclear chain reaction that only last a millionth of a second. Those photos are on the web.

Ken
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12 years 1 month ago #211051 by icepics
I think Edgerton did some fascinating work in this area. I posted links to the sites related to his work at MIT in my earlier response (but didn't include a comment as to what the links were). There are a number of bullets and blasts, drops and splashes etc. on there.
Sharon
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12 years 1 month ago #211340 by ShadowWalker
How difficult are these things to set up?
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12 years 1 month ago #211365 by pottsy62
Isn't this question along the same lines of photographing a drop of water rebounding from a bowl of water? I have tried this with camera settings of 1/1000 speed, with continuous shooting, but STILL cannot get it right!
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12 years 4 weeks ago #219634 by TogStar Photography
No bullet is quicker than the speed of light #JustSaying
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11 years 11 months ago #233664 by Melliott
The easiest way to do this is with a high speed camera. It is made by Olympus and is too expensive for the hobbiest to even rent. Otherwise, you are going to need a special high speed flash syncronized to flash as the bullet exits the barrel. You will certainly need a ballistic chronograph if not to trigger the flash, to get the speed of the bullet for the necessary calculations. How you trigger and how you go about setting everything up will depend on the gun and the ignition system. I believe that folks that do this type of photography usually use a gun designed for the purpose. I am both a professional photographer and gun maker with an engineering and computer science background and my feeling is that if you are asking this question here, you probably do not yet have the technical expertise to do this. You can't do it with commonly available off the shelf products. You are going to have to do some engineering and make some things.
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