HIGH SPEED PHOTOGRAPHY--

Cousin Dennis Wolf recently shared a high-speed video clip via email.

It reminded me of when I was a photographer at the News Journal and met an engineer from the Tappan Co., who had done his undergraduate degree at MIT with the scientist who helped develop the electronic flash.

He was able to dig out some of his old paraphernalia and we went to work in his basement one evening with some balloons, eggs and a .22 rifle clamped in a vise.

His flash (strobe) was triggered by a microphone lying on the floor and he believed it to have an interval of about 1/1,000,000 of a second.

We hung a string from a rafter directly over a stand where we intended to place our "targets", turned the lights out, opened the camera lens and fired the gun. The sound wave would hit the microphone and trigger the flash, and, we could see the bullet as it was frozen by the extremely short burst of light. So could the camera.

Moving the microphone back and forth on the floor would control the actual place of bullet illumination.

Then, we started shooting eggs, a very messy but extremely interesting experiment. The velocity of the bullets varied, but after awhile we had pictures of the bullet just piercing an egg, inside a cracked egg, and, exiting the other side.

Naturally we were using a solid wood backstop at the rear of our "studio".

Then we used air inflated balloons (water would have exacerbated our growing mess) but bursting them with our strobe-illuminated bullet left us with images of latex disintegrating but the powder inside the balloon still revealing a ghostly inflated shape.

My engineer friend had a very tolerant wife.