After I received a bunch of entries for the Easter Speed Photography Challenge there were a specific few that I thought was absolutely brilliant.
I’ve seen it done with high speed video recording but it never occurred to me that you could get a still image of a bursting balloon that was full of water!
Below is one of the shots sent by Gary Lapslie….
These inspired me to…
1 work out how he did it and 2 come up with something fun to use it for!
So off out in to the garden I went, armed with a packet of water bombs, a ball of string, and a BB gun. I rigged up a work mate with a chunck of wood and hung a semi well filled water bomb from the string….!
I then setup a black back drop behind it and put the camera on the tripod.
There seems to be two good ways to achieve this, one is to use a flash to freeze the action which requires a darkened work area the other is to use the camera. As I was working out in broad daylight I figured the latter was the better idea for this situation. With a 50mm prime lens, I did a little trial and error but eventually I set the camera to 1/4000 sec shutter speed and F/2.0 and ISO 800.
So now that it seemed I was getting good images it was time to work out how to shoot the thing with the BB gun and still take the picture…. I set the camera to take a burst of 5 shots after 10 seconds. Focused with auto, then clicked to manual. I set the timer counting down and ran round to the side with my BB gun cocked. As soon as I heard the first shot from the camera I fired at the balloon!
This actually made me laugh out loud as the balloon spiraled round urinating all over my trainers…. I got another balloon and tried again…..
By this time I had worked out that I needed to get braver when filling the balloons. The next one I did was a trembling quivering wreck…. Honestly, how it didnt explode all over my legs I’ll never know…. However, I got it setup and went for another go.
That shot made it all worth while for me… I was sooooo pleased that it was the 2nd shot in the collection of 5….. and it was perfectly framed in the scene…. plus as an incredible bonus you can actually see the BB leaving the frame on the the right!!
Now that I had worked out how to do it I wanted to make a cool image so I got out my RC tank and created the below image…..
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