A project I've been working on...

[Jehu]

I spent hours and went through three 12-packs of Old Milwaukee Non Alcoholic to get to this point. This is the only film-version that worked. It's also the only one where the glass didn't break. I used Kodak Portra NC160. That was not the best choice but it was the only C41 film I had at the time. I now have Kodak Ektar 100. I hope to be back in the studio soon.

[Jim Cole]

Impressive, Jehu! Curious as to how you made that work if you want to share. 36 cans of beer (I use that term very loosely) were sacrificed to the gods of photography, but it looks like it was worth it.

[Jehu]

The room was darkened to the point where the ambient light was negligible. There was a bank of 6 speedlights camera right about 16 inches away from the subject. The lights were set to 1/64. The flash duration at that power on a Nikon Speedlight is about 1/20,000 second. I put a timer delay on the digital camera which was sitting as close to the view camera as possible.

Procedure:
-Press shutter release on the D300. Beeping countdown starts and red glow is emitted from the camera.
-When I hear the shutter of the digital camera open (set to 1.5 seconds) I open the view camera shutter with the cable release.
-Throw the cue ball.
-The breaking glass triggers an audio release (home-built) to set off the flash
-Try to close shutter before the cue ball bounces against something and causes another flash.
-After the digital camera closes, the shot is over. I either got it or I didn't.

Obviously, the glass didn't break on this attempt. The digital shots look great but this is the only film shot that really turned out. At f16, I didn't have the depth to capture this properly. I moved the lights closer and metered for f32. That's when I started getting decent results but, by then, I was out of Old Milwaukee Non-alcololic brew. There were a couple of attempts after the one I posted but They had double flash exposure.

Setting the lights closer had another benefit. The background is black seamless about 5' behind the subject. When I had the lights further away the background was showing.

[slackercruster]

V nice!

[JBelthoff]

Just curious but what kind of english did you use on that shot? :-)

jk Nice shot!

-- JB

[Jehu]

Just curious but what kind of english did you use on that shot? :-)

jk Nice shot!

-- JB

High right. I wanted position for the shot glass next.

[JBelthoff]

I would have personally gone for a little inside myself! Just to see if I could get the glass to spin. ;-)