Nathanielross Loc: Northeastern Maryland.

Pointing a camera at a mirror and taking a flash picture works

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

When I was a kid we made a lot of different explosives. The drug store only had a limited stock and the proprietor knew us all. We had to set up a straw company, get letterhead printed, and order from the supply houses in the city.

In High School I wanted to be a chemist. But I then realized that the REALLY BIG explosions were based on physics, not chemistry.

kemert

Sounds like fun to me! A typical firecracker has very little powder so don't let the nervous Nellie's dissuade you. You may have a better chance of catching one "exploding" if you set off a whole pack and shoot frames as rapidly as your camera is capable while the crackers ignite.

tcthome Loc: NJ

Also might want to give your wife some spending money & send her out shopping.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

Given your parameters, (though I would not do it indoors, but hey!) If you are in darkness, set the exposure for a enough seconds to cover the time you need to create the explosion. No light will enter beyond what you have in the blacked out room, tight aperture, go to town!

Robg

This reminds me of one of my best memories from high school (many decades ago). A friend and I were in advanced chemistry and had learned that fluorine and hydrogen when both in the gaseous state are so unstable that a reaction between them can be triggered by light. That is, light has enough energy to start the reaction. The light acts like a match. The resulting fluorine-hydrogen reaction is very fast, i.e., an explosion, a fact that resonated well with our 17-year-old pyrotechnic inclinations.

So we set up two reactions to generate hydrogen and fluorine gases and mix them in a large test tube covered with masking tape except for a small slot through which the light to trigger the reaction could be shined. The other purpose of the masking tape was to prevent flying shards of glass in case the explosion shattered the test tube. The bottom end of the test tube was suspended in a water basin to prevent contamination from the atmosphere and to absorb the energy of the explosive reaction.

We found that the energy in a flashlight beam, lightbulb or daylight was insufficient and then had the idea to try a flash cube on a brownie camera. That worked! A lot of energy in a flash. Plus, when we developed the film that was in the camera we found that we had great pictures of water flying out of the basin!

sippyjug104 Loc: Missouri

I doubt that a conventional camera will have a shutter speed fast enough or be able to be synced to coincide with the explosion.

Now...high speed video can capture a bullet in flight and an exploding light bulb. A video also tracks a length of time rather than a millisecond.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

I heard of someone that was a friend of a neighbor of mine put H2 and F2 in a large technical balloon and exploding it with light.

Dispite my criticisms of the OP idea of explosions, in HS I got hold of some Potasium metal and had fun tossing it in water. My teacher said I could carefully do it with Sodium but I figured out Potasium would be more spectacular. And it was! Imagine Cesium!!!

Robg

We have similar backgrounds. I had a summer job cleaning the chemistry labs at Purdue and we had a lot of fun tossing left over sodium and magnesium (!) into the rain barrels outside.

E.L.. Shapiro Loc: Ottawa, Ontario Canada

"Just for fun... I want to get a shot of a firecracker exploding"

This can be added to a long list of famous last words.

In my brief but intense experience, in the military, with all kinds of explosives, I have come to the conclusion that I don't like them and advise folks not to mess with them if they don't really have to.

Most consumer-grade firecrackers and fireworks are not quality controlled. Some are very unstable, and even the small "ladyfinger" kind of firecrackers can relieve you of your fingers or blind you. Even experienced pyrotechnical folks have suffered serious accidental injuries.

Maybe it's about the kid in my old neighbourhood, who purchased a pack of those small firecrackers from a gentleman in the area who ran a hand laundry service. He put them in his pocket, they spontaneously exploded and he thereby emasculated himself. I remember the unfriendly folks in Vietnam, used small firecrackers for detonating homemade boobytraps. Nowadays they call them IEDs.

Better idea- if you have one of those speedlights that have incredibly short flash duration at low power settings, it's safer to smash an old light bulb with a hammer and freeze the shards of glass in midair. Wear eye protection.



See attached an image and excuse my morbid sense of humour. But I am serious about the danger.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

This was back in 1972. The kids don't get to do anything dangerous in Chemistry classes now. I did some substitute teaching during the Nineties. My HS teacher was really good but a bit crazy. He would do some rather dangerous experiments and demonstrations. He even showed a few students how to make Nitrogen Tri-iodide. It seems some of my classmates stole a bottle of Iodine and were bowing things up all over campus and at their homes. They even got the vice principal to step on some. He was not pleased but most of the student body thought it was funny since he was a prick. I was not interested in making this explosive after seeing how unstable it was. Dust or a house fly landing on it would set it off.

promfh Loc: Redwood City, CA, USA

It was far less than 100 years ago. When I was a teenager (50's) I worked for a commercial photographer (hauling his gear around) and he showed me how to use flash powder in several different situations. Yes, there were more modern types of lighting available, but he believed there was something special about the soft, warm light of a tray of flash powder for certain (night architecture) images.

Nathanielross Loc: Northeastern Maryland.

When I worked in Ballistics research we had fast tac film cameras good for about 16000 frames per second. The bullet leaves the barrel before the recoil lifts the muzzle.

E.L.. Shapiro Loc: Ottawa, Ontario Canada

Mr. Silveran was our 7th grad science teacher. Perhaps not realizing he had a class full of wild early adolescents, some of whom suffered from acute pyromania, taught us all about chemical reactions and slow and rapid oxidation. He was very entertaining. We asl did a unit on volcanos. In the classroom, there was a paper-mâché model volcano. To simulate an eruption a mixture of Potassium Permanganate and Glycerin was mixed in a tin can with the model, In a few minutes, sparks and smoke would fill the classroom and half the hallway. We then had the recipe for the word's greatest stink-bomb.

We also learned that the deadly gas in the gas chamber was no piped from the local gas company but was a chemical combination of cyanide, sulphuric acid and distilled water. Oneof the kids wanted to make it to kill the mice in his house. Good thing he couldn't get the cynaide.

The big bangs were sodium in water and a tiny flame at the end of a thin stick in a bell jar full of hydrogen!

Fortunately, most of us lived to become grownups and we don't fool around with dangerous stuff anymore! Ain't THAT RIGHT MR. firecracker photographer???

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

LOL I must at 66 be nearly the youngest member of the UHH! The first flash I remember using other than flash bulbs and flash cubes as a kid already had a Thyristor circuit. For a large building you might still need flash powder to illuminate it at night.