Bursting bubble I
Ever since I saw Richard Heeks Bubble Pop: Reflection Perfection I wanted to capture images of a bursting bubble. It turned out that it is really difficult to capture a bubble in mid burst. It takes about 10ms for a bubble to burst. So you can imagine that it took me some attempts until I got the images I wanted.
First I tried to use little metal balls to burst the bubble but it turned out that those balls were to little and they just went through the bubble without damaging it. Therefore I decided to use different objects to burst the bubble. I did some research in the internet and it appears that the thickness of a bubble is around 140 nanometer. This is about 10x smaller than the diameter of a red blood cell or about 1000x smaller than the width of a strand of human hair. Even if they seems very fragile I captured some images where a straw and a needle are going through the bubble without doing enough damage to get the bubble to burst.
As I mentioned I wanted to use little metal balls and a photo gate to have more reproducible method but as this didn't seem to work I decided to use other objects and trigger the flash by hand. It was very exhausting (even if no cleanup work is required here) as my success rate was about 5%.. But finally I'm very happy with the outcome. I was able to capture the bubble at very different stages of the burst.
This one is the first of the series showing the very beginning of the burst.
Sony A550
Sony 100mm
ISO 800, F22, 5s
Setup pic can be found here
Strobist: Two SB28 at 1/32 power with DIY flash snoot firing at white background
Some words to the camera settings. It turned out that 1/16th power is to slow to freeze the action, so I had to go with 1/32th power. To increase the DOF I was using a very small aperture. All those factors resulted in a very dark image so that I had to set the ISO to 800, even if I don't like to increase the ISO. Due to the "high" ISO you can see that the picture is noisy in the upper left corner.
More images, howtos and the highspeed 101 can be found on my homepage: www.pascalbovet.com
Bursting bubble I
Ever since I saw Richard Heeks Bubble Pop: Reflection Perfection I wanted to capture images of a bursting bubble. It turned out that it is really difficult to capture a bubble in mid burst. It takes about 10ms for a bubble to burst. So you can imagine that it took me some attempts until I got the images I wanted.
First I tried to use little metal balls to burst the bubble but it turned out that those balls were to little and they just went through the bubble without damaging it. Therefore I decided to use different objects to burst the bubble. I did some research in the internet and it appears that the thickness of a bubble is around 140 nanometer. This is about 10x smaller than the diameter of a red blood cell or about 1000x smaller than the width of a strand of human hair. Even if they seems very fragile I captured some images where a straw and a needle are going through the bubble without doing enough damage to get the bubble to burst.
As I mentioned I wanted to use little metal balls and a photo gate to have more reproducible method but as this didn't seem to work I decided to use other objects and trigger the flash by hand. It was very exhausting (even if no cleanup work is required here) as my success rate was about 5%.. But finally I'm very happy with the outcome. I was able to capture the bubble at very different stages of the burst.
This one is the first of the series showing the very beginning of the burst.
Sony A550
Sony 100mm
ISO 800, F22, 5s
Setup pic can be found here
Strobist: Two SB28 at 1/32 power with DIY flash snoot firing at white background
Some words to the camera settings. It turned out that 1/16th power is to slow to freeze the action, so I had to go with 1/32th power. To increase the DOF I was using a very small aperture. All those factors resulted in a very dark image so that I had to set the ISO to 800, even if I don't like to increase the ISO. Due to the "high" ISO you can see that the picture is noisy in the upper left corner.
More images, howtos and the highspeed 101 can be found on my homepage: www.pascalbovet.com