Experimental Method

   In this experiment our apparatus included a high power air-rifle, flat head pellets, a vertical gun rack, ring stands, a vivitar 283 flash, a sound trigger, an Apple II computer as an interface for our sound trigger, a bucket of sand, metal, wood, and a Nikon 990 digital camera.  The gun rack in made of 2x4s and points the gun downward.  The bucket of sand is placed under the gun so that it catches the pellet after it leaves the muzzle of rifle.  The metal is placed underneath the gun between the muzzle and the bucket in the clamps.  The clamps are held up by the ringstands which are on either side of the bucket.  Click here to see the diagram of our experiment.

   The camera setup was a little complicated.  We placed the sound trigger above the gun rack so that it was as close as possible to the source of sound.  We then hooked the computer up to be the interface between the flash and the sound trigger.  It acted as a high tech delay.  It took us a while but we finally found that the right speed was around .09 milliseconds.  We then set the camera about .4 meters away from the objects being shot.  We then used an aperture of 7 for the wood shots and 5.6 for the metal shots.  The film speed was always 400, and the camera was completely zoomed in to the object or material being shot.  We used a 1 second exposure time which was plenty of time to set off the gun and capture the event.  It was with these settings that we took all of our pictures, the best of which are able to be viewed in our photo gallery.