Has anyone photographed bullets in flight?

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jmorris

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I am going to give it a shot (pun intended) and wondered on what methods others have used?

I am going to try a digital SLR, remote flash triggered by two foil sheets that contact upon impact (like the first chronographs).

Then I thought the sympathetic flash trigger I have might work and that I am long from the first to try, might be worth asking.
 
There's old video from I don't know when of bullets at super high frame rate, have to find the video. I wonder if there any papers on the flash a bullet makes when it hits a target, believe there's a bunch of hypothesis but don't think they really know. Kinda like is light a wave of a particle there still not sure.
 
Yeah, I have linked that one a few times myself (great example of hard plate and mild steel, beginning and around 7:30). I don’t have the high speed camera but that would be perfect.

Even better would be for someone to capture bullets coming apart in flight and I’d just copy the images.

I would like to capture the event similar to the glass bending in the bottom photo, using the technique I described. With stuff I already have.

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It's amazing the speed the cracks in glass Mitigate, same with Prince Rupert drops. There's cool video showing how different explosives trave, black powder moves super fast guess that's why they use it with big shells.

you can rent the cameras, think it's like $1000 a day, you need a crazy amount of light and when up at over 1m frames the screen is very small.
 
You’ll need more than a digital slr camera to catch bullets in flight. The shutter speed is way too slow to get the image to show a tiny projectile, especially in focus.

These types of gun-firing shots are kind of fun and much easier to do with an slr.

648004BB-5460-4E58-9B1D-9B7A7C0254F2.png E2243F15-7004-4E51-8C80-3CFD388DC390.png 45DC178F-2B98-485C-AC12-EBB3F815B91E.png ED2DFADF-749A-4A54-BD0B-CFA8D05B6EB5.png F4E3555C-BC64-411E-8724-F80497E87139.png

The light indoors is too dim for anything faster than 1/128 sec shutter speed. Thats why there are blurry bits.

Good luck :thumbup:.

Stay safe.
 
You’ll need more than a digital slr camera to catch bullets in flight. The shutter speed is way too slow to get the image to show a tiny projectile, especially in focus.

The way those hammer/bulb photos were taken was the SLR, shutter open in the dark, the impact drove two sheets of foil together, triggering a flash, it’s all done in the dark, so shutter speed doesn’t matter. You can see the two wires that go back to the flash running along the garage floor to the right of the bulb.

$1000 is speedy but a lot cheaper than last time I looked. Not sure it’s that important to me, more of a want than a need.
 
I randomly caught a bullet leaving my buddies nagant by random chance once, it's blurry, but you can clearly see the bullet. But to do dedicated bullet photography you'll need a pretty high speed rig, way powerful lights and likely an air-gap flash. SLR isn't probably going to cut it. you're going to want/need exposures in the neighborhood of 1/10,000 more likely in the range of 1/20,000. or in video terms. likely exceeding 20,000 frames per second.

The amount of light that will require is equally absurd. Something on the order of a 300,000 foot candles. That's a mighty big flash. But an air gap flash can easily do this. ironically they're absurdly easy to operate and control. probably the simplest part of the equation to catch the bullet.

Again though, this is what would be needed to replicate photos like the famous one where a rifle round is piercing an apple and you can clearly see the rifling marks on the bullet and the apple just in the earliest stages of disintegrating. IIRC I want to say that was an air gap flash and something like 100,000 fps, using the cameras for photographing nuclear explosions.
 
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You could rent a phantom or similar high speed camera. You could then film it outside. That unshielded-thermonuclear device floating around in the sky provides plenty of light.
 
Found this one. Along the lines of what I am going to try.

View attachment 1088640

yep. that's an air gap flash with a camera left in "bulb" mode.
you'd have to have a completely dark room to pull that off. the motion is frozen because the flash duration is so incredibly short.

IIRC that was a film camera. which would operate a little differently than a DSLR would given how the sensors work.

now if you can find an old quality 35mm film camera, something like a Zeiss F2 lens, and some 80 iso film. and build yourself an air gap flash. you'd be in business on the cheap. But - you'll also get to be an expert on film developing since pretty much no one does that anymore.
 
You could rent a phantom or similar high speed camera. You could then film it outside. That unshielded-thermonuclear device floating around in the sky provides plenty of light.

it does, and yet it doesn't. shutter speed dramatically affects how much light makes it in. our perception of bright, vs a camera's is radically different.when you're talking the absurd speeds required to catch a bullet. the amount of light available in that moment - even from the sun. is essentially very very dark.

without digging into way more math than I wanna do this early in the morning. So caveat - this is highly oversimplified and taking some pretty liberal assumptions.
Full sun on a clear day is 1000 foot candles. to freeze a bullet traveling at 1000ft/s at 100ISO with an F1 lens, you would need 1,000 times as much light as the sun gives you.
 
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My father, uncle, brother and I wanted to chrono some stuff once after dark so we set the chrono up in the shop and shot out the open door.

We had to get clever with our lighting for the chrono to pick up any of the projectiles.

The result of all that was at the right angle with just a new-ish Iphone and the old slow 45 ACP we could get a couple frames of the bullet flying out the end of the chrono.

So get some good lighting and I bet you’d be surprised what some basic equipment can do. Now high-res super slow mo. Probably need some fancy tech.
 
Some photography knowledge and tricks to accomplish this:

The foil trigger thing with flash in otherwise long exposure might work. The idea (for others less familiar with photography) is that the foil trigger will fire a 1/1000-1/2000 flash impulse when the bullet is in the appropriate position. The camera shutter would need to be set for longer exposure - which could even be REALLY long exposure - such the camera shutter is open and capturing already when the bullet comes into view and the flash illuminates it. The downside - 1/2000sec flash impulse will cast light on the bullet for 500 microseconds - a bullet at 3000fps will travel 18” in 1/2000th of a second. So a longer sync speed with a FAST flash impulse is still way too long of light impulse for capturing a clean image of a bullet. You’ll get a picture of a copper streak 18” long.

Most modern mirrorless cameras will fire 1/8000sec shutter speed, meaning it’ll capture 125 microseconds of exposure. A 3000fps bullet will still be moving 4.5” during a 1/8000 exposure. Better than 18” (assuming you could solve the trigger issue that the camera would fire at the same time as the flash to capture anything besides black), but it’s still a 4.5” copper streak instead of a clean bullet.

Reminding also, a bullet rolling 275,000rpm (1:7” twist around 2700fps), will also roll over about 2/3 of a revolution during a 1/8000 shutter speed, or 2.3revs during a 1/2000 flash impulse…

Video frame rate and burst speed are a different calculus altogether - the means of capturing the bullet when it is positioned in front of the lens. Super fast mirrorless cameras will burst at 20 frames per second. Video frame rate is much faster at up to 60-120 frames/sec. But even at 120frames/sec, a 3000fps bullet will travel 25ft between frames. Most of us would prefer to have the frame tight enough to have the bullet be large enough to perceive in the frame, so a composition as wide as 25ft doesn’t make much sense.

So the answer is a high speed camera.
 
1 million frames a second on a 9mm bullet going through an egg. No light except the sun.



Not a cheap camera or lense.
 
I spend a little time trying to get a fundamental understanding of what I was up against this afternoon.

This is the trigger I rigged up. A plastic lid, with a hole cut in it, contact wires on either side and two foil sheets as well. All held in place by a magnet and hunk of hack saw blade.

70E95FF8-8EBB-4BFF-A695-D3E1F4E7EB83.jpeg



Shots impact and touch sheets together and the flash fires.

image.jpg

Short story is it works as in I can tell there is something in flight but I am going to have to relearn the camera and flash I have. Guess my mind remembers my old Minolta 35 mm better than the Nikon I was using, felt like an old fart trying to set a clock on a VCR. Fun while the beer lasted though.

I’ll try and figure out how to get the images I did captured uploaded, need a cord due to the odd memory card.
 
That stuff's hard.

Back in the day, they were done in dark rooms with high speed film reels, strobes, and wide open apertures.

They do sell these incredibly expensive high - speed digital cameras nowadays - there are YouTube channels which feature these types of videos almost exclusively due to their novelty.
 
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I had remembered the work but not the name, thanks for that link.

Found this.

The next paper relates the success of Ernst Mach and P. Salcher in creating an apparatus to illuminate and photograph a bullet in flight—this was again found in the Scientific American, but for 24 September 1887…This paper "Photographische Fixierung der durch Projektile in der Luft eingeleiten Vorgange" presented to the Academy of Sciences in Vienna in 1887, was revolutionary in more ways than one, as it was really about the visualization of flow over objects, and in particular, the movement of media as a bullet traveled at supersonic speeds—and to which Mach would donate his name for the description of units of supersonic speed.

https://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/05/the-history-of.html

If I ever knew that I had forgotten it. So it’s like learning something new already. :)
 
Somewhere in my old book stash, I have a book from the 60s or 70s on this subject…
 
Yep, slowmo guys on youtube is awesome. They have a lot of bullet and gun stuff.

This one is pretty impressive. 9mm against steel ball bearing. Hint, the 9mm doesn't win.

 
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