Somewhere I've got a copy of a National Geographic showing underwater Autochrome
pictures. Amazing.
Garett, this is awesome! Note the three stages. The fireball that emerges from the handle is insane...clearly the guy knows this because the expression on his face before he fires the flash has that "oh sh*t" look. The flash itself is quite powerful (frame 2) as is the mushroom cloud of smoke (frame 3). I so need to have one of these!!!
--A
PS: The flash itself is much larger than I expected!!! Thanks again for posting.
Someone else mentioned the use in theater. I was Applegate in a production of Damn Yankees about 30 years ago. Applegate was to appear the first time in a cloud of smoke. Worked OK, except that the first time it was done in rehearsal, of course, the rehearsal was over until we aired out the theater.
Hi Alec, I just saw your website and I'm very impressed by your photo work!! I plan on going to New York to take photographs using every photographic medium possible. I use the wet-plate process- (ie. ferrotypes, ambrotypes, glass negatives), daguerreotpes (mercury & becquerrel. I prefer mercury.), flash powder, salt printing, and regular darkroom black & white printing. I don't know much about digital.
-Race
Nice light - due to the BIG 'fireball'. It's really hard to obtain such light by any other means! That's why magnesium is in my "planned to do list," too.
I've not taken pictures with flashpowder light yet, but I had lots of fun with magnesium - both the pure metal and many home made metal+oxidizer mixes - as a kid. Those days back in the USSR you could just go to the local metal recycling plant, pic up an airplain wheel in a huge pile of gabbage and take it home for free. The most difficult part of the trip was finding a small one carriable by just two guys, yourself and a friend of yours... and no, there was nothing one person could handle.
Well above 90% of the wheel metal was magnesium. We just filed it by hand. No heat = no danger at all.
Race, that's a nice group of flashguns you're showing us.
I do hope you are being careful not only with flash but also with the mercury that you mention and that daguerrotypists poisoned themselves with in the early years.
Lots of bulbs still available:
http://www.flashbulbs.com/meggaflash/meggaflash.html
Also, don't use a CO2 extinguisher on magnesium because they are reactive:
http://www.ilpi.com/genchem/demo/co2mg/index.html
Yes bulbs are available but as for the dimentions of the actual light-emitting body, flashbulbs are only a little bit better than a conventional electronic flash, and by no means even come close to magnesium powder - especially the pure magnesium (no oxdizer) one.
The oldest and, IMHO, by far the best method of burning magnesium for photographic lighting was to blow pure metal powder through a spirit lamp fire by pressing a rubber bulb connected to a tube full of mugnesium powder and with an opening just below the spirit flame. The 'fireball' could easilly get 3 to 10 feet in diameter... and be really 3-dimentional, not just soft-box-like!
Oxidizer-containing magnesium mixtures, though, should never ever be put anywhere close to such an open-flame lamp - with them, an explosion is just unavoidable!
Be carefull... and enjoy.
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