Flash Bang

This study focused on capturing a subject that isn't normally seen with the naked eye, like the early motion photography work of Eadweard Muybridge's 'The Horse in Motion". Muybridge wanted to prove something that an average person would never be able to see, all four of the horses hoofs off the ground mid-gallop. He was able to capture these images frame by frame to tell a story through the horse's movements. I wanted to do something similar but used the muzzle flash of a gun as my subject. The muzzle flash is the fire trail following a bullet being shot out of the chamber because of the exploding gunpowder that propels the bullet. Each gun's muzzle flash will look different based on the barrel, the bullet's caliber, and the grain of the bullet. These differences however are almost imperceptible to the naked eye, they all just look like a flash of light. My collection of images aims to display these unique differences in flashes from different guns and even the differences in each shot from the same gun.

I thought this was a unique subject to capture because the jargon around firing a gun is very similar to taking a picture with a camera, both involve shooting at a target and both shots can produce a flash. Shooting can be a scary word in most situations but when used in a camera context there's never a second thought of why we use that term. We transform a word normally understood in the news as destructive and full of despair into meaning to capture something aesthetically pleasing. This project is meant to mend the two meanings, taking a potentially scary context and turning it into something almost otherworldly you normally can't see.

Capturing the speed of the process of the gun and getting the exposure of the muzzle flash correct was a hard balance. I ended up attempting these shots at different times at dusk at an outside shooting range and even a few at an inside range to get a variety of shots as well as to test different viewpoints of the flashes of the same gun.