Ever see pictures of a bullet shooting through fruit and wondered how that was captured? How about a picture of a water balloon popping the instant it was punctured? This is called Speed Photography, and shots like these are actually quite simple, once you understand the concepts.

Bullet Passing Through a Water Balloon 3

In this tutorial DPS Forum member rt80639 shares how he takes these types of shots. Check out his flickr account here – particularly his ‘sound trigger test‘ set of images.

What you need:

  1. External Flash
  2. Flash Trigger

Shutter Speed Myth

Most people believe that speed photography is done through very fast shutter speeds, like 1/1000 or faster. However, this is not true. Flash duration is the primary component for capturing motion. The duration of flash units range from 1/1000 of a second to almost 1/30,000 of a second. So as long as your subject is very dark, the only light your camera sensor will see is the light coming from the flash for that very short duration.

Flash Triggering

So now that you know that flash duration is more important than shutter speed, you need to have a way to fire the flash when the action happens. This is done by using a flash trigger. There are three main types: sound, light, and mechanical. Sound triggers will fire the flash when a loud sound is heard, and mechanical triggers fire when something comes in contract with the trigger. Light triggers create a beam of invisible light between two points, and fire the flash when the beam is broken (commonly used for water drop photos).

The sound trigger I use was a home-built job with parts from Hiviz. They kits are cheap ($7), but require a little electrical expertise. If you have an electronics background, they are super-easy to build. If you would like a fancy pre-built model, you can get one for about $170 here.

The Photo Shoot

  1. Turn off or dim the lights
  2. Open the shutter
  3. Perform Action (I like shooting pellets at stuff)

Examples

Included in this tutorial are two examples of a pellet passing through a water balloon (using the sound trigger), and one of a water drop (using a light trigger).

Perfect Timing

Apple Splash

Note from the Editor: Also check out the setup of the Apple shot here and a series of shots of 3 eggs being shot here, here and here (with the setup of that here).

Lastly for a little more inspiration check out our previous post – 13 High Speed Photography Images.

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