Edgerton ".30 Bullet Piercing an Apple" : WEEKLY DISCUSSION #7

I chose Harold Edgerton's ".30 Bullet Piercing an Apple" (1964) for a number of reasons. It's one of those images that demonstrates how

photographic technology can help us to see our world more accurately and more completely. Beyond being a techological study, the image is aesthetically pleasing with its rich colors and intriguing subject.

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Edgerton was able to freeze the high-speed action of the bullet as a result of his pioneering research with electronic flash. Most cameras and flash heads today use this technology, but in Edgerton's day, it existed only in the domain of research laboratories.

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Finally, I must admit that this image has always fascinated me. ".30 Bullet Piercing an Apple" seems to represent the ultimate expression of the William Tell apple-shooting story.

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<a href="http://americanart.si.edu/images/1991/1991.89.14_1a.jpg">.30 Bullet Piercing an Apple</a>

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Harold E. Edgerton was a professor of electrical engineering at MIT. Edgerton did research with stroboscopic equipment

designed to produce extremely short bursts of light. Techniques developed by Edgerton were used to photograph the initial microseconds of nuclear explosions in the 1950's and 1960's.

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Edgerton credited fellow MIT researcher Charles Clark Draper with the idea to use this still highly specialized technology to

photograph ordinary objects. Edgerton's photos of milk droplets forming the shape of crowns are nearly as famous as his Bullet and

Apple image.

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Citations: Most of the content above I researched courtesy of Wikipedia. I would encourage you to use their site to learn more about Harold Edgerton and his photographs and techniques. Edgerton designed photographic equipment for undersea researcher Jacques Cousteau.

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.30 Bullet Piercing an Apple was shot on 4x5 film. The article linked below provides how the image was made.

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<a href="http://webmuseum.mit.edu/detail.php?type=related&kv=96483&t=objects">Link to the MIT Museum Website</a>

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<p>Edgerton's work is amazing. The milk droplets, and balloons breaking are my favorites.</p>

<p>Dan:<br>

Believe it or not, I've never seen this image before. The bullet's entry and exit have an abstract, almost otherworldly, quality. I'm not sure the power of the photograph would come across as well if the exposure were lighter. Excellent choice!</p>

"...but in Edgerton's day, it existed only in the domain of research laboratories."

 

Not quite. Almost immediately upon it's invention Gjon Mili, began working with "Doc" Edgarton to make commercial and

advertising photographs, primarily for Life Magazine.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gjon_Mili

 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/11/gjon-mili-and-the-science-of-movement.html#slide_ss_0=1

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53035820@N02/sets/72157625235349034/

 

http://www.amazon.com/Gjon-Mili-Photographs-Recollections/dp/0821211161

 

Edgarton made a lot of money on his electronic flash patents (and other inventions, mostly involving very short duration exposures) but at the end of World War II, he made his electronic flash patents freely available for all. My understanding is that he decided to do this together get the world back on a more solid economic footing. His generosity ignited the photographic lighting manufacturing sector across the board from the victors to the losers of the war.

 

 

 

Contemporary footnote: popular technology writer David Pogue is Professor Edgarton's nephew.

<p>Doc Edgerton came to the Kodak Research Labs in the late '70s and told us about his latest work. He was using electronic flash to study feeding habits of bats. It turns out bats don't catch bugs in their mouths. They catch them in their wings and then put them into their mouths. </p>

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<p><em>"Beyond being a techological study, the image is aesthetically pleasing with its rich colors and intriguing subject."</em></p>

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<p>It's interesting that these types of photos were probably made for the sole purposes of achieving technical perfection and scientific study without a thought to aesthetics. These days high speed still photography is pretty much relegated to achieving pretty pictures and scientific studies have moved on to using (ultra) high speed video. <br>

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Far from aesthetics in the traditional sense, though, these pioneering images achieve a level of beauty simply by showing us something we've never imagined seeing before - incidental aesthetics, if you will. <br>

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I posted some details a couple of months ago on Edgerton's work on magnetic shutters to photograph the first nanoseconds of an atomic blast. There is a link in it containing a one hour lecture on Edgerton's life and work. <br>

<a href="/casual-conversations-forum/00c7GS">http://www.photo.net/casual-conversations-forum/00c7GS</a></p>

"It's interesting that these types of photos were probably made for the sole purposes of achieving technical perfection and

scientific study without a thought to aesthetics."

 

I don't believe that to be true. I think aesthetics were very much on their minds. Short duration electronic flash opened up an entirely

new way of seeing and my belief is that Edgerton and his students were far too intelligent not to be aware of the

aesthetics of the photographs they were producing, at least in some cases.

Ellis, today everyone has an electronic flash in their smart phone. Can we agree that it was less common in the years when Edgerton was

doing his laboratory work? Most photographers were still using flash bulbs at the time.

 

Further, the equipment that Edgerton used was highly specialized down to the gasses that filled the tubes. They were engineered to

minimize the duration of the flash. I don't know how their specs match up with today's studio strobes, however.

 

Ron, I remember seeing something on PBS about that slow motion study of bats. It was fascinating. I didn't realize that Edgerton was involved, but it makes sense.

 

Michael, I find this to be an aesthetically pleasing photograph. It's well composed - I wonder how many takes that required - and the exploding red apple is perfectly balanced against the blue background. I have always gotten a chuckle over the fact that the apple was mounted on a shell casing.

Dan, I never said anything different. To the contrary. Electronic flash was (and for many photographs still can be) a

technology that opened up a new way of seeing what happens at time scales radically different than those we can

otherwise experience. What happens in thousandths of a second can now be looked at for as long as you care to gaze at

it. That is part of what makes photography radically different from other visual arts.

 

The original gear that the early flash pioneers used was huge and bulky, even the cables were huge and heavy, and when

they fired it was like a shotgun going off. In the '80s I was photographed once by someone who used is commercial

version of it.

 

Even the best E F gear commercially available today (the very top end Broncolor pack and head systems) has flash

duration in the thousandths of a second range, compared to Edgerton's lighting which could worth at much much shorter

durations.

<p>These days, cameras with very high sensitivity sensors capable of million+ FPS means entire high speed sequences can be recorded under continuous lighting.</p>

<p>Going even further, University of Tokyo is doing research using stationary cameras with rotating pan/tilt mirrors to achieve extreme high speed target tracking. There's a video of the system tracking a ping pong ball in flight during a game that I can't find. Some day there will be high speed systems capable of tracking a bullet's entire journey penetrating multiple targets.</p>

<p>I think Edgerton would be impressed if he were alive. </p>

Ellis, thanks for the clarification. I misunderstood your earlier post.

<p>Whatever it is a fascinating photo ... thanks for choosing it for us to see :-)</p>

Great choice of a. photo Dan.,

 

Michael you are probably right. Have you seen the truck size camera built for the National Geographic to photograph

lightning strikes?

<p>It is a terrific photo with great impact and once seen never forgotten. It is also typical of photos which primarily rely for their impact upon no one having seen anything like it before. Many of these types of shot are by people using new technology to achieve something previously impossible in the tradition of Edweard Muybridge (1876 - galloping horse) and Dr Lucien Bull (1904 - insect's wing beat). More modern examples include the Apollo and Voyager mission photos and there was a guy who did a lot of ground-breaking micro-photographs whose name I can't remember. All stunning.<br /> <br /> I find all these images have a power based both on my admiration of their pioneering technology and also the enduring fascination of seeing something that is normally beyond our senses.</p>

The late Tim Samaras' "Kahuna" camera for photographing lightning:

http://www.newschoolers.com/ns/forums/readthread/thread_id/748520/

<p>Ellis, I had not seen that truck before but I have read about a similar million+ FPS film camera using rotating mirrors on a MIL site a few years ago. I can't recall the details, but one thing that stuck in my memory was that they used small explosive charges to blow up the mirrors in order to prevent double exposure. Maybe it's the same camera - there can't be many of those in existence. <br>

<a href="

- fascinating description</p>

<p>PS - the video talks about using explosives to close metal plates acting as shutters. Not sure if it's the same as what I read about. </p>

<p>Dan and Ellis have mentioned the aesthetics of the photo. While it's true that Edgerton was an engineer, he was also to some degree an aesthete. His recognition of the beautiful aspects of his photos helped him to popularize them and capture an audience (whether in a classroom or for sales of photos and flash equipment). For his picture of the bullet through the apple, there are a lot of things that contribute to its appeal, beyond the novelty of high-speed photography, that likely did not happen by chance. Why did Edgerton choose a large format color film? Why the choice of primary colors (red and yellow in the apple against a blue background)? There appears to have been care in selecting a nicely-shaped fruit, positioning it with the stem exactly facing the camera, and the mount being perpendicular to the bullet's path. The timing is exquisite; had the bullet not yet emerged from the apple, or traveled another inch or two, there wouldn't be the same pleasing arrangement of entrance/apple/exit/bullet. There is an appealing(!) symmetry of five red triangles at both the entrance and exit. There is an effort to balance the composition by having the apple off-center. No, this was not a test shot. This was made after much experimentation and deliberate decisions about aesthetics.<br>

<br />Edgerton also shot bullets through playing cards, and he showed a similar attention to aesthetic detail in them. He mostly chose face cards, which are more visually interesting than the others (and possibly because they depict humans?). I have also seen his shots through the three of hearts and through the ace of hearts - I doubt Edgerton meant that a bullet through these cards was a metaphor for anything, although it could be.</p>

 

<p>His flash allowed a view into an otherwise hidden world. Our persistence of vision only shoots 10 frames a second, and 1/10th of a second is awfully slow. Especially compared to the 1/100,000,000 second his xenon flash tubes fired in the 1920's. The man was both technical and artistic genius.</p>

<p>Thanks for this photo, Dan. We're getting an interesting variety of photographs for these discussions.</p>

<p>I forgot about this photograph. I also remember his "bullet through playing card" photos. I agree with Mark Zell and others who have pointed out the aesthetic aspects of this photograph.</p>

<p>I "cyber-follow" the storm chasing crowd during Tornado season and was very saddened by Tim Samaras' death this past summer. I was not aware of his Kahuna camera. I try to do storm photography when supercells are within close range of my home, but none of my lightning shots are in the same league with <a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/08/chasing-lightning/johnson-text?rptregcta=reg_free_np&rptregcampaign=20131016_rw_membership_r1p_us_ot_c1">these</a>.</p>

<p>The flash Edgerton used to stop a bullet is not typical of photographic flash units used today. The high pressure Xenon we use today dramatically increases the light output, but it also increases the duration of the flash. Edgerton used to jokingly refer to the rarified gas used for short duration flashes which consisted of the air in Cambridge, MA.</p>

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<p>Edgerton used to jokingly refer to the rarified gas used for short duration flashes which consisted of the air in Cambridge, MA.</p>

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<p>He apparently had a good sense of humility, humour and scientific curiosity.</p>

<p>Science and engineering (and medecine, which is effectively a bit of each) offer unique opportunities for photography. They can provide many such unusual (unseen) visual artefacts and most effectively engage the human curiosity and our desire to understand the previously unseen. Great art is also surprising in its visual impact. If that is in part a qualifier for aesthetic value then they both work. One sees in the photo an analogy to the beauty of a flower in bloom but then also realises its destructiveness for apples and for humans. Photographs under the optical or electronic microscope can also make the unknown familiar.</p>

<p>The comments of Colin put this type of photography in a tradition of scientific related photography that we are now quite familar with.</p>

<p>The photo spans about 12" across, and assuming the bullet velocity of around 1,000'/S, the time span across the image is about 1 millisecond. </p>

<p>I'm sure there's a setup description somewhere which I didn't look for, but the flash trigger will require microsecond precision in order to photograph the bullet in a predictable position, and would almost certainly be some sort of optical gate as triggering by sound would have been extremely difficult to achieve the required accuracy.</p>

<p>I can see the humor in using what appears to be a shell casing as an apple stand, but the aesthetics is almost entirely in the technical achievement of "getting the shot". In the photo, we can see the differences in velocity of the ejected material from the bullet's entry and exit holes. The background was chosen presumably to contrast the apple's white flesh, but to approach it as a photographer, at least in modern times, would mean addressing the shadows using reflectors.</p>

<p>This photo must have been one of many (hundreds, perhaps) and judged to be the "best" for press release. The others must have been less than optimal for one reason or another so in that regard one might argue aesthetics was a criteria, but taken as a whole, including the need for the bullet to be in the frame as proof of experiment, is the reason I see it more as a technical exercise with incidental aesthetics. <br>

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<p>By the way, here's Jeff Lieberman's portfolio on PN containing high speed (bullet) photography. Jeff worked in Edgerton's lab: <br /> <a href="/photodb/folder?folder_id=488067">http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=488067</a></p>

<p>From the second link in my original post which discusses the technical details of the image:</p>

<p><em>"<strong>Unlike most electronic flash lamps, which are filled with xenon, the microflash uses plain air.</strong> This choice produces a much shorter afterglow from the flash than a xenon lamp. When this flash is triggered, the arc displaces the air around it, much like lightning in a summer storm. And the microflash produces its own thunder, too, like a gun shot. To quiet the noise, a glass tube, sealed with a rubber cork at the open end, encloses the quartz tube."</em></p>

<p>Michael, thanks for the link to Jeff Lieberman's photographs. Very impressive!</p>

<p>The duration of Edgerton's shot is far less than 1 milisecond. At one milisecond, the bullet would have been a blur across the frame. We see it here as a stationary object hovering in space. The apple is seen early in the process of exploding. There was no apple left after the shot; it was obliterated by the impact.</p>

<p>Edgerton used to give a talk featuring this photograph. The title of the talk was "How To Make Applesauce." It would appear that he did indeed have a sense of humor.</p>