A very short exposure.

Harold Edgerton’s high speed (more correctly ‘short exposure’) photography is well known. Who is not familiar with his pictures of bullets piercing apples and inflated balloons?

The picture below is different. It’s the simultaneously cruelly ugly and strangely alluring image of the early stages of an atomic bomb explosion.

Atomic blast.

The exposure was on a special camera using an optical shutter tuned to one hundred millionth of a second. You can read the complete story here – the Flash images will not display on an iPad.