Saturday, March 21, 2009

Impossibly cool


I have absolutely no idea how to take a picture like this, other than to video it and grab a still from the MPEG stream.

6 comments:

  1. I've taken pictures kinda like that. I won't say it's easy, but it's doable with a still camera. It takes practice and timing. And luck. A camera with a super-high-speed burst mode, like 5-8 frames per second, would help too.

    Or a lot of very expensive equipment arranged so that the act of firing somehow remote-triggers the camera.

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  2. This looks like it was taken by leaving the shutter open in a dark place, (range, living room) and telling the shooter to shoot, then upon the firing, triggering a flash manually. Note that the shooter's hands are illuminated from camera right. The blurring results from having a flash of relatively long duration, as such things go.

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  3. Wolfwalker, I'll give this a try. I hear that the Moisin M44 gives a particularly spectacular fireball, so we'll see if we can capture it.

    Ritchie, that's a great suggestion. Don't know how you'd do that with a digital; it would be a cinch with my old Pentax K1000.

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  4. Are you sure of that Ritchie? I thought most flashes produce a hard white light, not this strongly red-yellow light. I'd guess this photo was taken with a relatively long exposure, about 1/15 or 1/8 second, by ambient light, and the blurring is primarily from movement. I don't know why the gun muzzle doesn't show any motion.

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  5. You can also do it with a multiple exposure, using a strobe trigger under bright lights.

    Of course your camera has to be able to take 3-5fps or so, but that's easy these days.

    Given the extremely dark background however, I'd say this is a frame capture from a 96fps or so video, taken under normal light.

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  6. 'scuse me I left a word out "multiple exposure burst" not an actual mutiple exposure of the same frame.

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