Shooting Bullets

shrimperblue

shrimperblue

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Dave
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Hi,

A friend of mine is a member of the local Firearms club.

Is is possible to photo a bullet being discharged? I am assuming it would need a continuous shoot, but what type of glass would you need? If its possible.

Has anyone done this? or tried lol?....:clap:
 
I'd imagine this would pretty difficult. Another good shot is cartridges being ejected from a shotgun, smoke normally comes out as well. Have been meaning to try it for ages but now it's hard to shoot in the UK. Was going to try in the US but I wasn't sure they'd be comfy with me photographing in the range. I did shoot some guns though which was great fun and actually more difficult than it looks.
 
Yes it's possible but not advisable! There are some famous pis of bullets passing thro' playing cards, apples, etc. These were shot on film using pre-focus, high-speed strobe lighting and an IR sensor/trigger.

The glass is up to you depending on how near you are willing to place your gear.
 
Ihad to do this once in my scientific photographer days.

The requirement was for a large format transparency but the technigue would work with any camera that has a "bulb" capability.

The shot is taken in total darkness with the camera pre-focused and the shutter open. The flash is fired by means ofa switch in the bullet path.

I made a switch by using an extention lead on the flash gun. The end of the cable that would normally connect to the camera was slit open to uncover the two wires. Each wire is soldered to a piece of kitchen foil and the two pieces of foil held an inch or so apart - in my case by means of a meccano frame and two wooden clothes pegs. The weapon is fired and the bullet pushes the two pieces of foil together on its way to the target. Check the resulting pic. If the bullet is short of the target move the switch closer to the target. If it hit the target already, move the switch away.
With high speed projectiles the movement may need to be fine tuned bytiny fractions of an inch. I ended up mounting a ruler on the framework.


SAFETY STUFF

THE FIREARM NEEDS TO BE CLAMPED IN SOME KIND OF VICE WITH A HOLDER DESIGNED FOR THE PURPOSE. FIRING WEAPONS IN THE DARK IS NOT A GOOD IDEA AND FIRING LOOSELY MOUNTED WEAPONS COULD EASILY BE FATAL

Don't mount the switch foils any closer than an inch. The draft created by you moveing around can set the flash off making you jump. If you are near the gun when that happens................

Lock the doors to the room, you do not want someone to think the room is empty (the lights will be off) and to come in as the weapon fires.
 
John, that's a very clever solution :thumbs:
 
Check out US firearms magazines, they always have bullet pics. The best are shots of blackpowder discharges in the dark - very cool.
 
I managed to catch this once :

P1080747.jpg
 
As JohnW mentioned you just need to use a darkened room with some very low duration strobes.

Lighting the scene really well and using 1/8000th sec wont work, its far to slow a shutter. A reasonably good flashgun will be capable of 1/40,000th ~1/50,000th on lowest duration which will be a lot better at freezing a very fast subject.

You need to decide on trigger; contact, sound, laser beam,etc then the positioning of the sensor basically microadjusts the timing of the shot. The timing then is used to fine tune the bullet so it ends up infocus.

I have read articles that often use lasers to aim the guns in a vice so thats another constant so you dont need to worry about aiming once initially set.

http://www.hiviz.com/ is a good site to learn about the basics.
 
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