Just out of curiosity, what is the muzzle velocity—or whatever the appropriate term might be—for a mortar round? The reason I ask has to do with shutter speed, among other things. Or, to be more exact, I was awestruck by this photograph from Afghanistan: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Photo by John Moore/Getty Images, via BBC. I mean, are you ever going to see a mortar so clearly in flight? Damn fine photo.
Wow. Stunning image. I too would be curious as to the 'muzzle velocity', or whatever... I'm a photographer, and if I was going to attempt that shot, given the bright light, and the fact that the photographer is relatively close [you can see the barrel distortion], I'd be shooting 1/500, for a minimum...
I'd just put the camera on 1/2000 of a sec and then put it on automatic to take about 10 shots in a second. One of those shots would capture that image I'm sure. Todays cameras even take more frames per second so that would be even better to do.
Yer. Basically continous shooting at the highest shutter speed with good light. The greater the shutter speed, the less blurry it is, but the less light required. It's a trade off between seeing the image, and seeing a blurry image.
According to The Physics Factbook, the speed of a mortar shell when it exits the muzzle of the gun is very roughly half a mile (1 km) per second. This is more than twice the speed of sound, more than an order of magnitude faster than a racing car, and quite a bit faster than the zippiest experimental aircraft (unless they're working on something they haven't told us about). In one tenth of a second the round travels about 250 feet (80m). So if you're taking ten shots per second and relying on the law of averages, your chances of catching it in your frame are pretty slim. Unless this photographer had some high-tech synchronization technology hooked up to the gun, this shot is the result of plain old-fashioned good luck. If it was taken at a shutter speed of 1/2000, the shell traveled about two inches (5 cm) during the exposure, which explains the blurriness.
