Here's an interesting shot.

Nice.....very difficult to capture a shot like that manually releasing the shutter. I'm sure your friend loved the .44 Mag....very unlikely she would ever get that chance back home....good job on you!

My wife captured our .50BMG at the moment of firing but the picture is not on this phone. Pretty impressive gas flow from the brake and my hair is in mid-recoil...lol

Outstanding!

The position would tell me that the hammer does not remain seated throughout the entire performance as I would have thought.

Click to expand...

Primer set-back in the case, and internal pressure in the primer pocket of the case partially re-cocks the hammer as seen in your photo.

Many folks do no believe this can happen.

But old Colt Single-actions shooting low pressure ..45 Colt loads can re-cock themselves and rotate the cylinder if the firing pin bushing is missing in the recoil shield.

There was an early machinegun that operated the whole gun off of primer set-back in the dawn of machinegun invention in the early 1900's.

Outstanding photo BTW!
She didn't even shut her eyes!!!!

And who here among us can say that when shooting a .44 Mag!!

rc

Here is a couple of me shooting a 45 colt Blackhawk. The camera caught the fire but not the gun

i think this is probably one of my favorite shots.....357 mag from a 2" SP101

This reminds me that I haven't shot my SP101 with a hot .357 load in a while. I used to giggle a bit at an indoor range watching the blast. A bit of a waste of usable gases, but still pretty interesting to see.

Anybody notice the grip the shooter is using in the first pic?

Cool Pics Guys......Thanks for sharing

TennJed said:

Here is a couple of me shooting a 45 colt Blackhawk. The camera caught the fire but not the gun

Click to expand...

OK -- I'll bite. Where the crap is the gun? What type of photo physics is at work here?

Here's the .50BMG I mentioned....not a handgun and not nearly as dramatic but a good shot nonetheless......

One of favorite "burners" is a 2" Taurus .22WRM but no pics of it.....yet

Photography is one of my far too many hobbies.

Shots of the fireball are all a case of luck over skill. It's like trying to take a picture of someone popping off a camera flash at you.

One way to get around that is to set up the camera for a longer exposure time for the lighting conditions. That means a smaller aperature and longer exposure then go for a "fill flash" but without the flash on the camera. Instead the fireball becomes the flash.

On a compact camera use the "forced no flash" option. Then try it with a "fill flash" option. The "fill flash" is a setting that holds the lens open long enough to capture distant lighting conditions and make them look more or less like daylight while allowing the flash to brighten up the subject close in instead of leaving them looking like a sihouette of darkness. Such a setting SHOULD capture the shooter and gun nicely to freeze them and remain open long enough to capture the fireball.

The long exposure times will, unfortunetly, tend to blur the fireball. Things like M Cameron's donut of fire would not be possible as the donut is moving and would blur out. Such dramatic shots will remain a matter of luck and lots of attempts.

In all these cases a tripod or steadying the camera against something is wise to avoid blur.

At dusk or indoors it's not hard to set up the camera for a long exposure. With a quarter to half second exposure time and a little coordination between the shooter and camera operator it should only take a few tries to capture a good fireball picture.

Spend a little time with your camera's instruction manual if required and try it. We'll likely find ourselves knee deep in great fireball photos....

dbp said:

OK -- I'll bite. Where the crap is the gun? What type of photo physics is at work here?

Click to expand...

I have wondered the same thing. I am not a photo guy so it is above my head. My wife was trying out a new camera and had it on a setting where you hold the button down and it takes multiple shots. (a setting used for sports shots I believe.) The gun was in my hand, but why the camera did not pick it up I have no idea

OK -- I'll bite. Where the crap is the gun? What type of photo physics is at work here?

Click to expand...

Remember that the shutter is open for quite a few milliseconds, so things in motion get blurred. The gun is dark colored and in motion (rotating upward and recoiling) so it is blurred out. The hands and arms are pretty stationary and are brighter so they imaged fine. The flash was imaged because of its brightness.

Unless that's the new Active-Camo Super-Concealed Carry edition...

I did, and and wondered how that was not caught by the OP before firing the gun.

In the OP, I wonder if the blurred hammer is kickback or just shutter blur like the invisible Ruger farther down. Any road, S&W had to work on some of their monster magnums which doubled from that bounce. Hard to imagine, but it was a warranty item for a while. I bet it hurt, too.

There have been several automatics running on primer setback.
There was one that used special ammunition with a thick head and very deep primer pocket. The primer cup acted as a piston with a fairly long stroke.

But John C. Garand's first rifle was primer actuated with WWI GI .30-06. It was obsoleted by changes in the ammo. I always thought it was the shift from the old hot Pyro DG powder to more progressive MR and IMR types that did not kick the primer back as sharply. I have also read that it was ineffective with crimped primers when that became routine, but I have seen enough blown primers to think that would not hinder it.

By the way, that rifle had a box magazine. Don't blame Mr Garand for the enbloc clip, that was Pedersen's doing. The brass apparently liked it as a way to reduce ammo wastage by those newfangled automatics.

Here's my favorite:

It's from Wikipedia, in their article about S&W.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Bullet_coming_from_S&W.jpg

Cool pics!

A friend of mine and I set up my camera one day and tried to get some shots like that. We never got a good muzzle flash shot, but I did get one of my friend flinching slightly. So it wasn't a complete waste.

Good Thread BBQ, glad you helped your friend have a great experience!

Taking "muzzle flash" shots has been a hobby of mine for somewhere around five years now. I've slowly been increasing the quality of my pics over that time. I'd bet my dollar that your hammer wasn't 'blown back' by the primer in your pic, and that it's more a matter of light and the way a camera takes in bright light vs a lack there of, as well as when exactly the shutter is open and closed vs the timing of the trigger-pull/hammer-drop/shot itself. I have dozens upon dozens of pics like these, and the hammer blur is very common in mine. Also very often, the hammer hasn't even seemed to move yet somehow, and yet there is the muzzle-flash present in the photo, such as in these two examples.

S&W 629-2 'Mountain Revolver' .44mag


J.P. Sauer/Hawes SAA Peacemaker Clone in .45 Colt


I believe that the the great intensity of the flash leaves quite an 'imprint' on the photo when captured while the shutter is open, and the hammer doesn't reflect nearly as much light especially when in motion, so unless timing is incredibly precise as in shutter starts just before hammer hits primer, the hammer either disappears or blurs, or if the flash is towards the end of the exposure than it will appear as if still cocked/in rear postition because it was in that position for most of the shutter's duration. Seems so wordy when I try to write it, if we were talking face to face I could communicate this better

Dang TennJedd - you look like you should be a character in Mortal Kombat! throwing fireballs.

benEzra said:

Remember that the shutter is open for quite a few milliseconds, so things in motion get blurred. The gun is dark colored and in motion (rotating upward and recoiling) so it is blurred out. The hands and arms are pretty stationary and are brighter so they imaged fine. The flash was imaged because of its brightness.

Unless that's the new Active-Camo Super-Concealed Carry edition...

Click to expand...

I would buy that explanation but how do you explain the gun going transparent? Look again, you can see the foliage behind where the gun is supposed to be! How does an open shutter or a gun moving up turn that gun transparent?

I would buy that explanation but how do you explain the gun going transparent? Look again, you can see the foliage behind where the gun is supposed to be! How does an open shutter or a gun moving up turn that gun transparent?

Click to expand...

The same way a picket fence with wide gaps seems to become transparent when you drive by it fast; when the background is unobstructed by the moving item, you see it.

If the gun moves a foot while the shutter is open, then any given part of the background behind the gun is going to be visible, both before the gun gets there and after it passes by. If the gun blocks a particular part of the image for 1/10th of the time the shutter is open, the light the camera catches from that portion of the image is going to be 9/10th background and 1/10th gun. So the gun in the pic looks like a foot-long smear with the background showing through.

Fortuitous shot of the kid shooting the Alaskan:

How does an open shutter or a gun moving up turn that gun transparent?

Click to expand...

You have to understand how film or image sensors work. They see light, not dark. Light registers on the sensor while a lack of light does not. The final picture shows this lack of light as a dark area.

Now that sounds simple but the idea is that a light object will register where a dark one won't. So with a longer shutter time the brightly lit leaves in the background above the gun paint the image sensor first. Then the gun recoils and moves up. The dark gun does not erase the image of the brightly lit leaves when it blocks the light. Instead it simply stops any further exposure of that portion of the image. Meanwhile the gun moving up and out of the way lets the leaves that were originally hidden by the dark coloured gun to register on the image sensor.

So what you get is that the gun appears to be invisible.

Now if the gun were a polished stainless and there was a lot of light on it then what you'd see would be a bright pizza wedge like fan of white as the bright light from the gun itself paints over the area on the image sensor.

Another example of how this works is to set up a camera in a dark room and then click it open with a long exposure time. Now shine a weak flashlight or laser spotter on the wall and move it around like you're doodling with a pen. The final picture won't show a spot, it'll show the whole doodle pattern of the light moving. It doesn't just remember the last location as the shutter closes and show a single spot.