V&A
Harold Edgerton   American, 1903 - 1990
Shrimp (shadowgraph) Schliever photograph of a .22 calibre bullet above a flame Plankton Queen of Hearts playing card hit by a .30 calibre bullet Milk Drop Coronet
Shrimp (shadowgraph)
Zoom inShrimp (shadowgraph), 1978
Harold Edgerton, 1903 - 1990
C-type print, 1982
Harold Edgerton was an electrical engineer and began to take photographs as scientific experiments. In his first, he tried to produce a perfect coronet from a single drop of milk falling into liquid. To do this he invented the stroboscope - a device to produce short bursts of light. This allowed him to take split-second pictures of objects in motion which could not be seen by the human eye, including bullets and hummingbirds in flight, light bulbs shattering, and athletes in action. Some of his photographs had an exposure time of less than 1/10,000 of a second.
Ph.236-1982 © Harold & Esther Edgerton Foundation, 2002, courtesy of Palm Press, Inc.