Alan Sailer's incredible high-speed photos are taken with a death-dealing home-made flash. Photo: Alan Sailer

Alan Sailer is a photographer. He fires things very fast at other things, and then uses a homemade high-speed flash to capture some quite stunning images. Here’s how he got famous:

Was a very, very obscure photographer working in his garage shooting stuff with a pellet rifle and photographing the results with a home built flash.

Then in early 2009, someone linked one of my pictures to a social networking site. My boss came by one day and told me my site was getting a huge number of views. Emails from magazines, newspapers and even Good Morning America started clogging my FlickrMail box.

It was very stressful.

Stressful indeed. Thankfully, things settled down a bit for Alan and now he continues to add to the almost 1,000 high-speed photos on his Flickr photostream.

Why build a special flash? Because even with a flash duration of just 1/40,000th of a second, a typical flashgun isn’t fast enough to capture a speeding bullet, which will travel a blur-inducing third of an inch in that time. An air-gap microflash, however, lights up for just 1/1,000,000th of a second, fast enough to freeze pretty much anything.

The makings of a high-speed air-gap flash are detailed over at the Hobby Robotocs blog, although the author — Maurice Ribble — warns against making one thanks to the dangerous high voltages (35,000v) involved. He is fairly emphatic about this: “Do not build one! If you go against my advice and do build one, I am not responsible for any injury, death, or any other problems it causes,” he says.

The general principle, though, is that you load up a capacitor with 35,000 volts and then dump the electricity into a tiny glass tube which houses two wires with a gap between them. The resulting spark causes an incredibly short burst of light, perfect for capturing the moment that a lime tears through a hunk of raw meat.

Almost as inventive as the flash is Alan’s choice of subject matter. These include bullets hitting Christmas bulbs filled with water or jello, limes hitting, well, everything, and the amazing picture above, of a junk-store ceramic figurine with jello for a brain.

Alan Sailer’s Photostream [Flickr via BoingBoing]

High Speed Air-gap Flash [Hobby Robotics]

See Also: