Has anyone photographed bullets in flight?

[jmorris]

Well, I still haven’t had time to read manual on the DSLR loaned to me but I already know I need another way to get photos from it than the method I just used.

Anyway, this is what I came up with the other evening playing around.

Over exposed did turn them into streaks.





Get it just right and you can’t see anything because it’s inside the foil.



And not yet pushed through, sometimes.



and other stuff I didn’t expect, need to dig up a manual for the flash too. Seems Greek to me vs the stuff I used with my old 35mm cameras.

 

[Varminterror]

Are you manually focused? Looks like these are front-focusing.

Looks like your flash impulse must be much faster or your bullets much slower than I used in my example above, but overcoming that streaking will be tough.

Capturing a streak which is obviously a bullet, albeit not frozen, coming out from an exploding piece of fruit may yield satisfactory results for you, however.

 

[jmorris]

I made my best attempts to lock out the auto features but I didn’t have a handle on how to manually adjust aperture diameter, made for a very short focal length, add in my eyes that are well past their ideal days and I didn’t have any photos that were focused well.

I did fiddle with the accompanying flash to obtain the different results but didn’t feel like I had a real handle on it either. Need to spend some time learning it and the camera, before the next attempt.

I don’t have an explanation for the last two photos. They leave me curious. The direction of travel is right to left,

 

[roval]

sometimes you get lucky. i took my friend and his son shooting. being non shooters a lot of pics were taken. it was a bright sunny day and he snapped a pic of his son shooting a 1911 and caught the bullet about a foot from the muzzle. he took it with his iphone camera.the sunny day helped a lot as the bullet was glinting in the sun. it was a factory fmj.

 

[Varminterror]

@jmorris - what camera are you borrowing? We shoot Canon predominantly, but have Nikon and Sony cameras also. None drive the same, but we might be able to help faster than the gibberish which is oft in the manuals.

 

[CapnMac]

I'm wondering if adding some UV illumination might help the "white balance" sensors work better. That's going to be very dependent on what wavelengths the sensor and the CCD react to (which is very deep in the weeds of the tech).

I know UV filters can better "grab" muzzle flashes by "accenting" the colors for the CCD.

 

[jmorris]

@jmorris - what camera are you borrowing? We shoot Canon predominantly, but have Nikon and Sony cameras also. None drive the same, but we might be able to help faster than the gibberish which is oft in the manuals.

That would be great, it’s a Nikon, I’ll look when I get home and see what model but it’s at least a decade old.

 

[Varminterror]

That would be great, it’s a Nikon, I’ll look when I get home and see what model but it’s at least a decade old.

I have an old Nikon D7100 sitting around (actually used it at a wedding yesterday) which would be around that old - think they were released in 2013. Nikon’s not as consistent in menus and HMI among models as Canon, but usually they have the same terminology, just different button layouts and different menu structures.

I assume you were shooting manual mode? So you should have a wheel at the front of the camera which controls the aperture - about where your right index finger will land when holding the camera. Shooting a small aperture for a long depth of field will help, and the flash system will certainly enable shooting small aperture - you obviously have plenty of light, based on the first couple of over-exposed shots. If your body doesn’t have that wheel (?), then I assume you’d have to use all D series lenses with the aperture ring on the mount end of the lens - but I’ll assume the person loaning you the camera isn’t using a G series lens with a D-only body, so one of those two options SHOULD match this bit of kit you have.

Which does beg the question for AF as well - which lens are you using? I have two options for AF control on my D7100 since it’s an overlap era body; my lenses have an M/A and M selector, and then my camera also has one on the port side (left hand side if behind the camera, right hand side if looking at the front of the camera) of the lens flange also which says AF vs. M. That era was a little wonky for Nikon, as they still had some bodies which didn’t have autofocus drive motors in the camera and some which did vs. having the drives in the lenses, so the control is in 2 places on my set up (having an internal drive motor AND having drives internal to the lenses I use). So I’d disable the AF drives and manually focus with the focus ring on the lens.

 

[jmorris]

Thanks, the wheel was the one I was missing.

It’s a D200 and…

 

[Archie]

The 'Slo-Mo Guys' on You Tube - already mentioned - do some excellent work with high speed cameras. They do have some great footage of bullets in flight, but mostly they go for entertainment effects rather than 'scientific observation'.

One idea about taking pictures of bullets in flight. The M14 rifle, firing the 7.62x51mm NATO round was advertised - taught in basic training - as having a muzzle velocity of 2700 feet per second. The 7.62x51mm match ammo I later used was labelled as 2550 fps. A 'normal' single lens reflex camera has a shutter speed of 1/50 of a second. Therefore, the slower of the two rounds will travel 51 feet in the open shutter of 1/50 seconds. If all is perfectly timed the bullet will register as a 51 foot horizontal smear across the photo. A shutter speed of 1/250 second reduces the smear to 10.2 feet.
One obviously needs a much faster shutter speed and precise timing arrangements to get any useful picture. I submit special - at least to common photography standards - are required.

I think I remember the Slo-Mo Guys filming a bullet (can't remember what it was) at 50,000 frames a second. Movie camera, obviously, with each frame at 1/50,000 of a second. So each frame shows movement (of that loading, assuming the velocity is correct) is .005 feet. Which begins to show the details of flight.

The Slo-Mo Guys usually identify the equipment and frame speeds used. Frankly much of the information is magic to me. Photo enthusiasts will likely benefit more than me.

It is a sound and practical endeavor to my mind. But I sure won't explore it.

 

[Remington1911]

This is my slow mo guys video. Skip to about 13:40 for the cookie at the end.

 

[Dr T]

Here is a link to an interesting gallery of example videos.

https://photron.com/gallery/. The bullets transiting through ballistic gel are enlightening.

The numbers associated with the video cameras used to make the videos are, to me, astounding: Shutter speeds on the order of 0.5 microseconds and ISO's on the order of 20,000 boggle my poor, old Kodachrome 64-conditioned mind.

 

[armoredman]

Or, you could just get lucky. That little black dot over the white painted steel target is the ball in flight.