Photo appears to capture path of bullet used in assassination attempt | Hacker News Reader

Photo appears to capture path of bullet used in assassination attempt

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49 pointsgeox17 comments

That’s impressive picture!

Considering that this was the first bullet fired, photographer didn’t have any advance notice to start capturing burst photos, but they did - very lucky capture!

Or maybe it's just a snapshot from a video? I noticed younger people no longer capture single photos, but short videos.

Not video.

> "He took these photos with a shutter speed of 1/8,000th of a second"

A video camera shooting at standard shutter speeds (ie if being used by a professional) would likely not show the bullet. If shooting 60fps for eg so 1/120 id guess the bullet wouldn’t show up. Quick Google suggests typical 3000km/h out the muzzle which would have a 7m motion blur trail? Not sure how fast and to what speed a bullet slows in air

Professionals too, particularly sports photographers. A dozen photos are made in less than a second, and then the best is used.

That’s shooting in burst mode, it shoots separate photos rather than short videos. In sports you typically use short shutter speeds to freeze the action. If you would stitch these photos together into a video, the results would look jittery because there’s no motion blur.

Oh, so that's why they call it burst instead of film.

Video mode also doesn't use the whole sensor on most cameras because of the differing aspect ratio of film and photography and also rarely stores the raw for each frame, you'd have like 150MB-250MB per frame for that. Burst stores each individual image at full quality.

This article is written in such a weird way, as if the assassin was so sneaky that nobody heard the sound of the gunshot or the fact that trump got injured and the only evidence of the assassination attempt is a crappy image of the bullet which you're supposed to read like some tea leaves.

He got hit by a bullet and started bleeding. Why isn't the article about that?

because there are a million articles about that. this one is about the one in a million shot the camera man got.

The article was saying that this was likely the first shot. Standard bullets fired from an unsuppressed AR-15 travel faster than sound. No one in the crowd would have heard anything until about 70ms later (shooter about 125 yards away, assuming standard 62gr cartridge). Trump would have heard the crack of the bullet flying past him and maybe a few others close by but the rest of the crowd would have heard nothing. Based on how close that streak is to Trump, I doubt the photographer would have heard anything at the point the first photo was taken. Very rare to capture a bullet on camera when you don't even know it's coming.

I wonder how it sounded to him. Could the crack of a bullet grazing his ear deafen him?

Interestingly, Trump's statement after the incident seems to support this. When I initially read it I thought it was odd that he noted the whizzing first, but it now makes sense.

"I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin"

Lots of people online saying he was hit by teleprompter glass. This photo (if real of course) confirms that that is not the case.

> “It absolutely could be showing the displacement of air due to a projectile,”

Not sure why the agent say the photo could be of some air effect (shockwave?) and not the actual bullet.

A couple reasons:

- A shockwave is going at the speed of sound and the bullet is likely going faster than the speed of sound

- Some "air effects" may linger or occur at slower speeds. The pressure wave can cause humidity to condensate out of the air, for example. Sometimes you can see this in aircraft that are manuevering at speeds lower than Mach 1.0 because they change the pressure drastically around their surface.

On the topic of interesting photos, does anyone know what the logo on the shooter's T-shirt is from or represents?

https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/conte...

EDIT: never mind, should have checked Reddit first. From a (non-political) gun-oriented YouTuber merch. Not linking as it doesn't appear relevant and I'd rather not give him either the benefit or penalty of the publicity either way.

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