The Photographic and Life Exploits of Jacob Vorpahl.
I was a little hesitant to work on this idea I had for fear that two things would had happen: first, I might damage my camera gear; second, my wife would be a little upset with me. Only one of them came to pass and thankfully Sarah is a great wife.
My idea was to light a firecracker and capture the explosion the moment it splits apart. Apart from a rather annoying stench in the house for a little while after setting off three firecrackers, it was a success.
The above attempt was the third try. The two before it were way too blown out so I had to stop down my aperture to f36, then lower the exposure in post processing another stop just to get this. That little flash is bright! It’s not bright enough, however, to give a clear shot of all the pieces once it explodes. To get that, I put an SB800 on a lightstand directly above it, about 5 feet, then zoomed the head all the way in to focus the light. To do one better, I then put a gridspot on it to make sure it didn’t spill anywhere else. I wanted it focused completely on the firecracker. By the way, thanks again to DIYphotography.net for the gridspot.
I was worried that the pieces exploding out might damage my gear, but thankfully the pieces fly out from each end and since my flash was above and my camera at a different axis, I had nothing to worry about. The flash caught the pieces together while the firecracker exploding gave the light to catch the streaks of everything flying away. Pretty neat, I think.
Oh, and to make sure the SB800 would fire at the same time as the detonation of the firecracker, I put my camera on a 10 sec. exposure, lit the firecracker, then the light from the “pop” of the cracker set off the dumb slave on the SB800. Perfect sync. I also did this in a nearly completely dark room in my house. Still, it worked like a charm.
Very cool. Firing the flash with optical sensor is genius. I would have never thought about doing it that way.
That’s hilarious and brilliant, all at the same time. Like Don says, the method you employed for synching the slaved SB-800 was pure genius. I wouldn’t have thought the explosion of light from the firecracker would have worked to trigger the speedlight, but hey, I just learned something today
I’m thinking that one of the other challenges would have been achieving sharp focus in your near dark environment. I can remember trying to do something similar when some friends and I froze a few roses in liquid nitrogen and shot them with a pellet rifle, hoping to capture the moment of impact while freezing the action with a monohead strobe. Good times
http://www.flickr.com/photos/provia400f/363317184/in/set-72157594489758674/
Cheers
~gary