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Photo Journal: Day 1
On the first day of starting our project, we started setting up our system that we needed for the collisions. There was already a gun holder in the room that would allow us to place the gun facing downwards toward the ground. We noticed that if we missed the coin while we were shooting, the pellet would hit the ground and possibly damage the floor so we next had to find something for the pellet to hit after hitting the coin. We found a large bucket, which we filled with sand that would provide ample cushion for the fired pellet. The first few times we shot the pellet into the sand-filled bucket, the sand went everywhere, so we put a plastic cover over the top of the bucket. Once we had the gun and pellet stopper positioned in the way we needed, we next had to find a way to put the coin in the path of the pellet that was being fired. We found a pair of clamps and set them up on either side of the bucket. For holding the coin, only one was needed, but we used two to start out with.
We got a sound trigger to hook up to our flash unit. We put the trigger on the ground a certain distance away to provide a delay for the trigger. The delay would be equal to the time it took for the sound of the gun discharging to get to the trigger itself. This delay could be varied by moving the trigger closer or farther to increase or decrease the delay. We wanted the delay to trigger the flash as the pellet hit the coin, so to set this up we used the two clamps and a regular piece of paper. We set up the paper held by the two clamps above the bucket and shot down at the paper.
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We watched the paper and depending on whether the pellet was above or below the paper when the flash triggered allowed us to move the trigger to change the delay. We eventually were able to get the right delay for the pellet.
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After we did this, we then pondered over the fact that when the pellet impacted the coin, it would likely ricochet in a random direction. We got pieces of Plexiglas and put them around the setup to protect us and more importantly the camera. After this we set up the camera as close as possible behind the Plexiglas. Now that everything was set up, we were ready to take the first set of pictures. We had a little trouble setting the coin on the clamp in the path of the pellet, but we finally were able to get the pellet to hit. We then took some pictures of our first shots at the camera.