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Well, I suppose if I'm on, I may as well drop off some additional photos. Here's a set of strobe images I took, after perusing Alan Sailer's flickr page. He's got some amazing shots, in part because he has a better (custom) trigger system and a faster strobe, i.e. its energy delivery per unit time is higher, so for any given exposure setting it fires for a shorter period, resulting in crisper images. But the most important thing that he brings to his photos is a really strong, almost aggressive array of color. In fact, he'll fill stuff with colored jello in order to maximize the color in the exploding bits, which is a big improvement over the typical powder-in-a-balloon shot.
I tried to incorporate more color into this attempt, and I also added an air rifle. The timing is really difficult to get down with the rifle; it's a lot more cumbersome (but also more powerful) than the airsoft pistol I was using before.
After this set was finished sometime over the summer, I decided to stop doing high-speed strobe stuff, at least for now. It all started with a technical challenge from Dave Bartel to photograph exploding glass, which turned out to be reasonably easy, with the right trigger circuit. Now... I find I don't really care about the individual subjects (i.e., the chalk), and from a purely visual perspective, I think this domain is pretty well covered. From a technical standpoint, I think I understand the principles pretty well; improving the technique will largely be an exercise in electronics and building a systematic setup, all to photograph objects that I don't really care about. So I think that's probably it, until I find something special (like my PhD thesis) that really deserves exploding.
