
How a photographer landed an iconic shot of 1975 performance piece “Media Burn” - prismatic
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-is-this-space-age-car-slamming-into-a-wall-of-flaming-tvs
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nsfmc
i'm impressed by his decision to trigger by sound rather than trusting his
eyes: it gave him the chance to set up a more novel shot ahead of time.

incidentally, it's pretty much the same that doc edgerton used for many of his
bullet photos: you start a picture in bulb mode in a dark room and use a sound
trigger and time delay to trigger a strobe based on roughly how long you
expect the delay between the sound of the bullet firing and it hitting the
thing you care about.

Once you have a rough window, you can spend the rest of your time fine tuning
the delay for whatever effect you're going for.

now putting on my dan meyer hat, it feels like a fun exercise to determine his
reaction time based on the approximate speed of the car (possibly derivable if
we know the shutter speed?) anyhow, cool article.

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ghaff
One of the interesting things, which may not be obvious, is that using a
strobe in a dark room like that actually lets you see the bullet location with
your naked eye. You didn't need to use a Polaroid to "see" the position.

The microphone is best triggered on the shock wave of a supersonic bullet.
Accidentally shot a mic once trying to get it to trigger off a subsonic air
pellet :-)

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js2
The whole time I'm reading the description up to the shot, I'm thinking "luck
favors the prepared." So it was nice to see the photographer basically agrees:
Turner is sanguine about his success; he called it a “lucky shot”, if luck is
“skill and opportunity meeting at the same time.”

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cjcole
“Who can deny that we are a nation addicted to television and the constant
flow of media?”

"Like Us on Facebook"

~~~
willismichael
I voted this up and then realized that in doing so I'm only feeding the beast,
one click at a time.

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anigbrowl
An artist friend of mine started a 'zero likes' groupon FB where people were
encouraged to share awesome content but would get booted from the group if
they used the voting button. It _drastically_ changed the shape of
conversation (group members were a subset of a small existing community).

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gist
To those not old enough to remember, yes tv sets looked like that and there
was usually only one, maybe two tops in any given house. I remember that the
big event of the decade entertainment wise was when my family got a Sony
Trinitron Color TV. Boy was that nice compared to black and white.

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lrc
In a weird coincidence, I watched the movie "Network" (1976) with my wife &
kids last night, none of whom had ever seen it. They liked it. It didn't even
feel very dated, despite the fact that the televisions all looked like the one
in this picture. The complexity of the dialogue in the movie astonished us.
More was expected of the audience back then.

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verylittlemeat
One of the strengths of Network is the lack of music. In fact if I remember
correctly the opening scene is just the camera moving through a newsroom with
ambient sound.

Music can date a film badly.

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anigbrowl
True. It's also very hard to overcome the temptation to put in too much of it
to prop up scenes that the director/producer/editor isn't sure about.

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mcguire
Ant Farm? That brings up some memories.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Marsh_3](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Marsh_3)

