When the author of these
shots saw another collection of slow-down photos for a billionth time,
some strange desire has been borne within him and just a bit after
already no one could still this hunger of his as he decided to try the
tricky thing by himself and find out what is what. He was quite
well-prepared and attacked the thing with all his care: precise timing, a
sea of dodgy devices and his own bright head that helped him a lot with
such intricate calculations he was in need to make.
To make pictures of such a
kind, short exposure is not the main thing you need to care about. The
most important thing is the ideal synchronizing of your camera with the
thing you’re taking picture of. During the tests it was found out that
typical exposure time DSLR camera has is 100 mSecs and nine times out of
ten that figure varies greatly. Of course, one cannot even talk about
auto focus, as it can increase the time of taking a shot for 0.5 second
or more. Shots with water are the easiest ones. In spite of their
seeming evanescence (tens or hundreds mSecs, depending on their size),
figures of such shapes last longer than any others.
After sweating a few days
with synchronizing thing, the author decided to take totally different
technique up: you must take pictures in the dark using long exposure and
to flash the photographed thing up in the right time. On this picture
you can see mandarin orange pierced with an air rifle bullet. Grey line
on the bottom right corner is a trace of the bullet (the shot was made
with 1\4000s flash duration.)
All that is alright and
quite actually clear, though there is one solid question: how does
synchronization system work? For sure, this man is not Superman and
can’t pull the trigger by himself as he won’t even notice the bullet.
There are 2 major methods,
acoustic and visual one. Acoustic method is the best for any processes
accompanied with noise. You take a microphone and fasten it somewhere
near with the photographed object and when the bullet hits a target, mic
catches the sound and trigger pulls automatically. But it has one
drawback, poor accuracy and also you need to mind the speed of sound as
for 1 mSec sound can cover just 33 cm (~13 inches.)
Visual method is good for
its exact accuracy. You need to make the bullet and the photographed
object (or some of its remains after the hit) cross the laser light to
pull the trigger. Most of the shots presented in the post were made like
that.
That is almost all you need
to have to make such pictures, except a bunch of sophisticated devices
on hands and a clear head of yours.
