Martin Klimas Photography
I’m fascinated by the photography of Martin Klimas. He’s taking photos of movement that are just unreal. A lot of them show the subject in the process of being destroyed. There are a series of of photos of flowers in a vase that he captured as the vase was destroyed, but before the flowers were affected. While those are spectacular, I’m even more curious about the porcelain figures. How does he catch them in the midst of their own destruction? I wonder how many he breaks for each good photo? Fascinating work, go take a look, and tell me what you think.
h/t Tropist Weblog
From the comments: Strobe lights, baby!! – Jan
Strobe lights didn’t occur to me. I always forget you can use them in situations like this. I’m decent at photographic composition, but I don’t have the technical skills to back it up. I was curious about the synch too.
The vases in his pictures seem to be hit with some sort of projectile. It’s more obvious in some pictures than others though, so maybe he uses more than one method. A couple of the cell phone/electronics photos show a round projectile passing out of frame to the right. Ball bearing from some sort of sling shot? – HDW
Strobe lights, baby!! I do wonder what kind of timer he uses to synch the light with the impact though. And how many figurines he has to drop & bust to get one decent shot. The falling balls and marbles are really cool too. I wish I could get prints of his bird shots! That eagle is awesome.
Comment by Jan — June 22, 2007 @ 12:31 am
I knew you’d be able to help!
Comment by HDW — June 22, 2007 @ 8:23 am
It appears to be ball bearing, you can see it in three of the pictures – the tape player, the cell phone and the cassette tape. I don’t know how he’s firing it though.
Upon reflection, I don’t think there needs to be synch between anything but the shutter and the strobe. You just have to use the shutter drive and take a bunch of images in rapid succession. My 20D can only make 5 frames per second, but the new EOS-1D Mark III can make 10 frames per second with a maximum burst of 110 frames (!!) which would make this kind of shot child’s play.
Comment by jan — June 22, 2007 @ 1:23 pm
I’m doing something similar for my final folio for my creative advertising degree here in an Australian university…haven’t figured out how mine will be unique though. Came across this page while doing research on Klimas’s work process.
I’m very sure he used a high speed projectile to bust the vases and cassette players. Possibly even a bullet. It would have to be something extremely high speed to cause such a violent explosion. If he used a gun, it’s possible he just synced up the trigger with the shutter release with strings or something.
I’m not sure about the porcelain figures though, those don’t look like they were busted with a bullet…I read an article somewhere else on the web which said those images were mostly left to chance.
OH, and by the way…he used a large format camera for those shots. The prints are huge. He doesn’t do any of those 5-10 sequential shots and hope for the perfect image in one of them…with large format cameras you’re given one sheet of film and you have to reload after each shot…so you only have one go at it. Much respect.
Comment by Michael — July 15, 2007 @ 9:32 am