High Speed Photographs of Toys Stuffed With Firecrackers

Shatter Straw

Alan Sailer is a master of blowing up stuff. Last year Alan declared a war on Christmas ornaments and hit them with a pallet shot from an special homemade, high speed, air canon. But then he also hit just about anything with stuff shot from that air canon.

Now Alan has a new hobby worth noting. He explodes things with powerful firecrackers and captures the microsecond just after the explosion. Alan uses a deadly home-built strobes that have a very short exposure length and a DIYed debris detector. The results are interesting and freaking at the same time.

Here are some of the stuff that Alan exploded (click any of the images for more information):

Apple

Gelatin filled Pikachu

ceramic kitten

Mr. Potato Dead

Pineapple

Bell and Howell camera stuffed with clay

And here is the debris detector Alan uses as an input to CameraAxe, the device used to trigger the strobes that freeze the action (click for more information). Once a piece of debris crosses the infra red beam on the detector, a strobe is triggered

[Explosions by Alan Sailer]

P.S. we had a short interview and a movie of the air canon Alan uses a few months back. If you love to see things exploding, you may wanna check it out.