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Photographing Gunfire??


chris_muller

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I am a young ameature photographer and i have another hoppby of

firearms...so hoping to combine the two i need some help with the

lighting...i have a EOS 10D and a 550ex. these will be an outdoor

shoot so do you think that i will be able to freeze the path of the

bullet with the combination. any help would be appreciated!

 

thanks

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Chris, do a little math to answer your question. If you're really lucky, the 550EX might have a minimum flash duration of 1/5000th of a second (only guessing), but is probably not much faster than 1/1000th of a second - especially at full power. Assuming the best for the flash speed and to make sample calculations easy, how far would a bullet travelling at 2500 feet per second go in 1/5000th of a second? You surely wouldn't be able to replicate the frozen-in-time shots of bullets you've seen with the 550EX or any other commonly available flash unit.

 

Another significant problem is triggering the flash to go off at the right time to capture the bullet in front of the camera.

 

The bottom line is that this sort of thing can't be done with every-day equipment. It takes some really specialized hardware to do the job the way you probably imagine it.

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well thanks for the responses....it was just an idea...(that i will probably try anyway)...i think that i was thinking a little ahead of my league but i will imprivise and get back to you with the results....its kinda cold out but that might only add to the effect...

thanks for your help

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Well, as a quick comparison... my 550ex has a duration such that a pellet fired from my inexpensive (the low end of something that isn't just a cheap plastic gun, I think it claims 580 feet / sec) will be illuminated by the flash for about a distance of 1 inch at the lowest manual flash setting. More interesting is things being shot with the pellet gun because that won't be moving as fast.
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That comment on 155 mm howitzers was pretty close. Try photographing 120 mm mortars firing. They're about slow enough for it to be done with normal equipment. :-)

 

Small arms tracers are also fun to shoot (with either MG or camera, hehe...).

 

84 mm recoilless rifle (Carl Gustaf) and similar rounds should also be possible to photograph. You'd need an army though... ;-)

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Harold (Doc) Edgerton at M.I.T. did this first, with a high speed strobe(which he invented).Even a pedestrian .22 long rifle bullet, leaves the muzzle of a rifle at 1200 feet per second.This means at 1/1000 of a second exposure, the bullet has moved 12 feet!At 1/10,000 of a second ,the bullet has moved 1.2 feet.

 

 

If you watch carefully in bright light, many similar speed bullets can be seen with the nakid eye as they race down range.Freezing them with a strobe, is another story.

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**** Even a pedestrian .22 long rifle bullet, leaves the muzzle of a rifle at 1200 feet per second.This means at 1/1000 of a second exposure, the bullet has moved 12 feet!At 1/10,000 of a second ,the bullet has moved 1.2 feet. ****

 

Wow, that's some pretty bad math. Try 1.2 feet and .12 feet.

 

.22 LR rounds are a terrible choice anyway -- many handgun rounds are slower. Many .45 loads are around 800 fps. Or you can hand-load and make it about as slow as you want.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Emre:

 

That's a Photoshop job. Even with the negligible muzzle rise from the shutter speed necessary for that shot, the bullet isn't aligned with the gun.

 

Further, the bullet portion of the rifle round is much smaller than what appears in this shot. It looks like someone found a stock picture of an unfired round and motion-blurred it. It actually appears larger than the barrel of the gun.

 

DI

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Perhaps the "Turkish photojournalist" shot is of a grenade round fired from the rifle? It would be comparatively massive, and comparatively slow.

 

The more common approach nowadays is a grenade launcher affixed below a rifle barrel, but the weapon in that photo does not appear to have such an accessory launcher.

 

Be well,

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  • 2 years later...

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