explosions

Star Wars enthusiast @plasticstarwars shot a series of photos showing starfighters from the fictional universe at the moment of their destruction. Everything was done in-camera.

The Slow Mo Guys have captured some amazing things for their YouTube channel—including this amazing footage of glass shattering at 340,000fps—but their latest creation might be our favorite yet. Click play to see a firecracker explode underwater at a mind-bending 120,000fps.

Here's a behind-the-scenes video of an unusual photo shoot photographer Pete Leong did last year that featured a real military bomb disposal expert and C4 explosive detonations in the background.

Want to see what it looks like for a photo to go viral on Facebook? Check out these visualizations by San Francisco-based studio Stamen Design, which took three of the most shared images on the social networking service -- Marvin the Martian (visualized above), Famous Failures, and Ab Fab London, all shared by George Takei -- and created a visualization using the data from the hundreds of thousands of shares.

Atomic Overlook is a startling series of images by photographer Clay Lipsky that shows tourists enjoying the beauty of mushroom clouds at atomic bomb tests. Lipsky writes,

Imagine if the advent of the atomic era occurred during today's information age. Tourists would gather to view bomb tests, at the "safe" distances used in the 1950's, and share the resulting cell phone photos online.

Lipsky created the images by combining photos taken during his travels over the last 8 years with photographs of nuclear bomb blasts.

For her project "The Big Bang", photographer Deborah Bay captured macro photographs of plexiglass sheets that had various types of firearms fired at them. After having professional law enforcement officers fire bullets into the glass, she brought the sheets into a studio and "shot" them again with a Contax 645 and a 120 macro lens. She writes,

I began thinking about "The Big Bang" after seeing a sales display of bullet-proof plexiglas that had projectiles embedded in it. The plexiglas captured the fragmentation of the bullets and provided a visual record of the energy released on impact. As I began to explore this concept further, I also was intrigued by the psychological tension created between the jewel-like beauty and the inherent destructiveness of the fragmented projectiles. Many of the images resemble exploding galaxies, and visions of intergalactic bling sublimate the horror of bullets meeting muscle and bone. In fact, Susan Sontag described the camera as "a sublimation of the gun" -- load, aim and shoot.

Photographer Brock Davis likes playing with food. Among his food related experiments are recreations of famous explosions done with cauliflower. The image above shows the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

New Zealand-based photographer Geoffrey H. Short has an ongoing series titled Towards Another (Big Bang) Theory that explores "the relationship between terror and the sublime" with images of large explosions frozen in midair. Short hired film industry special effects technicians to create the "big bangs" using fossil fuel mixed with gunpowder.