Exploding Wine Glass

1/250 sec., f 25, ISO 400, Nikon D300 with an 18-70mm f3.5-4.5 lens at 31mm 

I had an idea for the Bistro 45 Calendar that required a glass of wine being shattered by a golf ball.  This had lots of challenges, such as the timing of the glass breaking to the shutter on the camera.  A bit of research indicated that this is normally done electronically.  So I made a trip to Radio Shack and bought a few electronic components – about $5 worth.  Using a Piezo buzzer for a microphone, and a couple of transistors to amplify the sound I had a circuit ready that would attach to my microprocessor trigger device, that I had built for hummingbird photography.

Once everything was wired up to the microprocessor and the camera I did some testing.  Sure enough, if I clapped my hands, or made a loud noise, the camera fired instantly.  I had included a variable resistor in the circuit to adjust sensitivity, and the microprocessor could be programmed to delay a few microseconds if needed.  I decided to test everything in the garage, so that I could dim the lights enough for the freeze action to happen by using camera strobes.  You can read about that in the hummingbird post.

After setting up a table with a white background, and getting the camera and lights dialed in for the right exposure I went for the big test.  I had the camera setup 90 degrees to the BB projector.  I setup a small piece of glass and shot it with a BB gun.  A bit of a Darwin Award maybe, as the BB and glass flew all over the place, but that was pretty much as expected.  However, the image that was captured was what I was after, glass flying through the air.  After shooting several pieces of glass I had the camera settings dialed in better, and had an idea on how many pumps to charge up the BB gun.

I got several wine glasses from Bistro 45 that were chipped or cracked and destined for the garbage.  I also had picked up a cheap bottle of wine ($3.50).  I filled a glass about half full and set it in the target zone.  I shot 3 glasses of wine, all with different results.  The main variables seem to be the number of pumps the BB gun had, and where on the wine glass to aim for.  I’ll follow up with another post of the final golf ball shot.