I haven’t been able to stop marvelling at this one.
Everyone’s already talked about the improbably perfect and potent photo captured of Trump, with fist raised, with the American flag and the perfect blue sky: like a scene from a Hollywood movie.
I talked about it too a few hours after the news broke.
You know, it is almost too perfect: but these things happen. Extraordinary photos exist and pro photographers have a knack for capturing perfect moments or iconic imagery.
But the one that baffles me is the photo purporting to show the actual bullet or its ‘vapor trail’ actually in motion next to Trump’s head.
I mean, how perfect or fortuitous is that?
As far as I know, I’ve never seen a photograph able to visually capture the movement of a bullet like that.
I’m not an expert on such things: so anyone is welcome to correct or educate me on this. But, perhaps wrongly, I assumed a bullet would be too fast for a camera to capture.
I’ve looked online for any comparable photos that have caught a bullet in mid air, and I can’t really find much. Apparently, it can be done, but it’s extremely difficult and very rare.
The best I could find was this photo by an experimental photographer, I think from a couple of years ago. But this was a controlled experiment, the whole point of which was to see if it was possible to capture the image – whereas the photographer at the Trump rally was just randomly taking a picture.
The artist, Peter Russell, explains in his notes: ‘I seriously underestimated the effort involved.’ He then explains the efforts and processes in dry detail, but we can get the sense of how rare and difficult a successful bullet capture is. He says, ‘After taking over 4000 images, using the 120 frames per second option at 1/32,000th second shutter speed I had absolutely nothing to show for my efforts – not a single pellet on any frame!’
He continues: ‘On my second attempt the ratio of shots taken to getting a successful capture was shocking! I took 51,598 images of 300 rifle rounds expended, getting ‘only’ 36 images with bullets captured in flight. The majority were taken at 1/32,000th sec, which on reflection is probably too short a shutter speed… In a total of 71,922 shots I managed to capture bullets in flight in 46 frames!’
And the guy at the Trump rally just happened to capture his at the precise right moment?
What are the odds?
Well, ‘one in a million’ is how newspapers have put it.
The Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who took the image has subsequently explained how he captured the image, saying: “I just happened to have my finger on the shutter and I heard the pops and just kept shooting. I didn’t know what I’d captured, but when I got to my laptop, I can see that bullet flying behind his head, because it’s definitely not in the frames right before it and it’s not in afterwards – it’s only that one frame. I was shooting at 1/8000s – it captured that streak behind him…”
I mean, sure, fine.
I looked at an old 2011 thread from a website called Photography Talk , where a photographer discusses trying to capture an image of a moving bullet and explaining how it was virtually impossible.
Another user on the site explains, ‘I hate to break it to you… but i doubt you are going to succeed. Of course that also depends on the bullet velocity… youd have better luck with a slow pellet gun, and if you were shooting more around 1/8000 second. and then it would still be a matter of luck…’
Which is implying that even the Trump rally NYT photographer Doug Mills’s explanation of using a 1/8000 shutter speed doesn’t make capturing such an image all that much more likely.
I guess we can just say he got lucky: and it literally was ‘one in a million’.
And he wasn’t trying to capture an image of the projectile obviously – it was sheer luck.
Still, given lots of other questions about this event in Pennsylvania, it doesn’t take an especially suspicious mind to wonder if the photo might’ve been manufactured.
This presumably isn’t meant to be the bullet that actually made contact with Trump’s ear, as it seems to be in the wrong place.
I mean, sure, I guess it’s a real photo? Right?
I’ll leave it at that, I think.
If we assume that this photo is authentic then the next question is: WHY was that that photographer using 1/8000 second shutter speed?
Some war propaganda photograph on twitter said that this is highly unusual even in war situations where things are expected to move fast and that this is the shortest shutter time offered by any of the top-of-the-line cameras he owns.
Yeah, I just find it suspicious. I mean, rare things can occur like that, sure: but add it with all the other coincidences and it becomes sus.