Bullet Time

The attempted assassination of President Trump on July 13, 2024 was one year ago yesterday. On that day, photographer Doug Mills took a photograph of a bullet, likely after passing through the helix of President Trump’s right ear. For the photo, Mills was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer prize in the breaking news category. The photo is highly unusual due to its technical difficulty, but also because he happened to be using the right settings to capture it.

Mill’s photo captures either a vapor trail and the bullet, or is a motion blurred image of the bullet. Either way, the trail appears to be about seventeen inches long. This is consistent with the speed of the bullet and Mill’s camera settings. Capturing a bullet in flight is near impossible to do without specialty equipment, a lot of practice, and knowledge of exactly when the bullet is fired.

Human reflexes aren’t fast enough to capture a bullet in flight. To catch one, specialty triggers are used. Such a trigger can be keyed to a sound and set to trigger the shutter a certain number of microseconds after that. However, audio triggers are useless for capturing bullets in flight from a distance. This is because bullets travel at supersonic speeds. The sound arrives after the bullet. Instead, an audio trigger would need to be keyed to the moment the bullet hits the target. This can only be done if one knows what the target is, and sets up a microphone and the audio trigger in advance.

Photographer and engineer Harold Edgerton specialized in high speed photography. He famously captured an image of a bullet piercing an apple in flight. To do it, he invented specialized strobe lights that produced flashes as brief as one millionth of a second, synchronized with cameras to capture sharp images of fast-moving objects. To get an idea how amazing this is, he invented this equipment in the mid 1930’s, with iconic images like the bullet through an apple captured by 1964.

While most professional camera bodies today, like those from Canon, Nikon, or Sony, cost up to $6,000 and cannot achieve such brief illumination durations, Edgerton’s custom equipment was a precursor to modern high-speed cameras like the Phantom, which cost $100,000 or more—far beyond the reach of even well-funded professional photographers. To be clear; Edgerton achieved his results with ultra high speed flash in a darkened room. The Phantom specialty camera uses extremely high shutter speed to achieve the same result. The difference is that a fast strobe is useless in daylight, but a fast shutter will work in even bright light. However, achieving Edgerton's results with shutter speed alone would require the expensive specialty cameras.

The reason for this is that a slow shutter in a dark room will only capture the illumination from the flash, which in Edgerton’s case is extraordinarily brief. In daylight, the slow shutter speed will capture much more light than the brief strobe, causing a blur or the total disappearance of the subject, if moving fast enough.

These details are why some photographers, including myself, were startled to see Mills’ photograph when it was published. The “bullet” is better described as a “streak,” but capturing even that is amazing given the context of the shoot and the equipment used by Mills.

Mills used a Sony A1 camera with a 24mm f/1.4 GM prime lens. This is a high-end system for full-frame photography, which will cost you about $5,898 for the camera and $1,398 for the lens. The settings he used for the photo are:

• ISO: 80

• f/1.6

• 1/8000 seconds

• 30 fps burst mode

• AF-C continuous autofocus

• Release priority

These settings are unusual. To understand why, let’s discuss what they are.

ISO

“ISO” is a digital equivalent to what used to be called “film speed.” ISO controls how sensitive the camera is to light - lower numbers need more light but produce cleaner images.

f-stop

F-stop controls the lens opening - lower numbers (like f/1.4) mean a wider opening that lets in more light but creates a shallower focus area.

Shutter Speed (/s)

Shutter speed controls how much light enters the camera and the ability to “freeze motion”. A fast-moving object requires a fast shutter speed (or fast flash in a darkened room) to obtain a sharp image.

Burst mode (electronic shutter)

This is like the “fully auto” trigger on a machine gun. If you hold down the shutter release, the camera continues taking pictures as fast as it can. My fastest camera can capture 9 images a second in burst mode, but Mills’ camera, a more recent model than mine, can capture 30, which is identical to video and faster than film in a cinema, which is often only 24 frames a second.

The drawback of shooting in burst mode is that you use up your memory card much faster than you would otherwise, and you capture that many more images to sort through later. Most will be garbage you end up throwing away, but only after multiplying your workload by a factor of 30.

AF-C continuous autofocus

Continuous autofocus constantly adjusts focus to track moving subjects.

Release priority

Release priority lets the camera take photos even if they're not perfectly focused, preventing missed shots during fast action.

Recap

The settings used by a photographer are a balancing act of the three primary settings when flash isn’t involved, as was the case when Mills took his photo.

Looked at together, one can see that each of these settings affects the other, and any setting can reduce quality by emphasizing something else.

This is why photographers buy certain types of “kits” based on the type of photography they specialize in. A sports photographer who shoots Formula 1 races like Darren Heath, is going to use much longer lenses for photos of cars in motion than a wedding photographer like Jose Villa, who is closer to his subjects, and more concerned with smooth image quality than high speed action. Advertising photographers often use medium format cameras for maximum image quality and high resolution images. This set of specialty cameras can cost $50,000 or more for a starter’s kit, and goes up from there.

Doug Mills’ kit

The camera and lens used by Mills at the Butler Trump rally is typical for journalists. It is small, light, fast, and takes reasonable quality images at a good resolution for reproduction in magazines or even small poster-sized double page layouts. It can be used for weddings or formula car races, but isn’t the ideal kit for either. In good hands though, it would still deliver good results. However, it is not capable of capturing long shots of fast-moving cars, nor of the satiny super high resolution images coveted by high end wedding-related or advertising clients.

The Sony A1 with a wide angle lens would be just as appropriate shooting war correspondence in Gaza or a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. It would work well for sports, but with a longer lens, depending on the sport (80mm for basketball, 600mm for motor sports or dangerous wildlife).

The settings suggest action

Doug Mills used camera settings that are ideal for action, not a shot of a former president standing at a podium on a bright sunny day. For instance, I once took a photo on a cloudy day at a political rally in Albany, NY and was able to get away with a much slower shutter speed than Mills’ 1/8000/s.

The image was shot handheld, and aimed to capture the motion of the flags in the background. It was shot at 1/320s, and caught all the flag motion in perfectly sharp focus. The slow shutter speed allowed mt to use a smaller aperture (f/6.3) which gave me the depth of field needed to get the speaker and everything on the platform in focus. The ISO of 200 compensated for the clouds, which blocked much of the light. These are normal settings for an event like this, though they would differ for a bright day.

f/6.3, 1/320s, ISO 200

On a bright day with some motion but nothing fast, you can do several things to prevent overexposing the image: reduce the aperture or shutter speed, or increase the ISO quality. For a shot I took at the Dutchess County fairgrounds a few years ago, I did two of the three. I reduced the f-stop to f/8, the shutter speed to 1/800s, but increased the ISO to 400 (making it less smooth). The reason is that, although there isn’t a lot of motion in this image, I wasn’t sure if the horse would suddenly start running, so I wanted to be prepared if that happened.

These settings are much slower than what Mills used for his iconic photo. The reason is that everything in the scene is moving slower than a speeding bullet. On the other hand, the horse, though walking slowly for a horse, was moving faster than President Trump at his podium in Butler, PA.

f/8, 1/800s, ISO 400

I shot some parkour athletes in Rotterdam back in 2015. These men were moving a lot faster than the horse, so I used a faster shutter speed, but still slower than Doug Mills used in Butler. Despite that, the images are sharp and have good depth of field. For these, I used a 28mm lens (similar to Mills’ 24mm lens), f/8, 1/1600s, and ISO of 200. This provides good image quality (low ISO), good depth of field, and a sharp image of fast action. Certainly, faster action than anything Mills could have reasonably anticipated at a political rally.

f/8, 1/1600s, ISO 200, and no, it isn’t a composite. They were all shot at once.

My specialty in the Netherlands was basketball. Specifically, 3X3 basketball, which is most often played outdoors. Before I switched to medium format, I had a couple of autofocus lenses that could go as wide as the f/1.4 lens Mills used in Butler. I later decided I didn’t like shooting with such a huge f-stop because it put too much of the image out of focus, and was very difficult to get what I wanted in focus. Regardless, I still have a few shots from that time that use similar settings to what Mills used at the Trump rally. One is as close to identical as I could get with the camera I had.

This basketball image is shot at f/1.4, 1/4000s, and ISO 100. The first two settings cause the exact same exposure as Mills’ f/1.6 and 1/8000s, and my ISO of 100 is as close as my Nikon gets to his ISO of 80. For those reasons, this is probably as close as I can get to the settings he used from my own stock of photos. Also, I am about the same distance from the subject as Mills was (between 5-10 feet).

Notably, this was taken with manual focus, like almost all of my basketball photos. This is because my Nikon’s AF lagged behind the players, making it unusable. That would not be true of the Sony A1, which has much more accurate and faster AF. If I had the same camera Mills did in 2015, I would have probably used the same settings to shoot this game that he used to shoot the image of Trump. That’s because, those settings are optimized for this level of speed. Not a walking horse, or parkours athletes doing backflips, but top professional athletes running and dodging as fast as they can.

f/1.4, 1/4000s, ISO 100

Now we get to the actual shutter speed Mills used, 1/8000s. I don’t know that I’ve ever shot anything that fast, except as an experiment. The reason is that at that speed, I’d have to open the aperture all the way, and accept all the focus and blurring issues that come with it. I have, however, gotten close with flash photography in my studio.

For the splash photo below, the only speed setting that matters is the flash, which was set to about 1/3200s (this is approximate because EXIF data doesn’t include flash speed). Notice that the goggles, which are moving slower than the water, are in perfect focus, while some water droplets are blurred due to their speed. In other words, if I wanted the splash to be in perfect focus, the flash would have to be faster.

Flash 1/3200s

The good news is that I have examples of that too. A few years ago, I did a set of photos of flowers dropped into a large bowl of water. The goal was to drop them so precisely that they would look perfectly balanced and still, but would simultaneously produce an elegant but subtle splash. To capture these, I had to set the flash to between 1/5600s to 1/8000s, depending on the flower.

If you look at the water drops in the image, you will see there is no blur at all. 1/8000s is the perfect speed to catch fast moving splashes. It is, btw, too slow for a bullet. That is why the bullet is a streak in Mills’ photo.

Flash 1/8000s

This brings us back to the Pulitzer-winning bullet photo by Mills. To achieve a speed of 1/8000s, he had to either open his aperture all the way (which he almost did, using f/1.6 instead of f/1.4) or his ISO, which would have dramatically decreased the quality of the final image. If he had gone to f/1.4, he likely would have had too much light to avoid an overexposed image. He couldn’t go lower than ISO 80, because that was his camera’s minimum. He couldn’t shoot faster than 1/8000s, because that was his maximum. He also couldn’t shoot more than 30 images a second, because that was also the maximum and that is how fast he was shooting.

One could say that the shutter was set so fast because it was such a bright day that he had to reduce the light. However, to accomplish the same goal, he could have changed the f-stop to something like f/12 or f/16, which would have increased the depth of field and the image quality. He could say he wanted an artistic blur in the background to isolate Trump, but the background in this case was a plain blue sky where no blur was possible. He could argue that he didn’t know what he would shoot or what was in the background when he set his camera up, but those settings can be changed fairly rapidly in the context of a static speech.

It is true that the bright light on that day is a good reason to either reduce the shutter speed or the aperture, but not both. The ISO makes sense for the lighting conditions. The only two reasons I can think of for the combination of maximum aperture and maximum shutter speed is either: 1) he wanted to blur the totally flat blue sky, or 2) he expected something extremely fast to occur in front of the camera. Something like a splash, not a bullet.

The physics of the situation make Mills' settings even more remarkable. AR-15 rounds travel at approximately 3,000 feet per second—nearly three times faster than sound. From the shooter's position roughly 400-600 feet away, the bullet reached Trump in about 0.15 seconds, while the sound took over half a second to reach Mills' position. This means Mills captured the bullet photograph before he could physically hear the gunshot. His extreme camera settings—1/8000s shutter speed, f/1.6 aperture, and 30fps burst mode—were already configured and optimized for supersonic projectiles before any audible indication of danger.

The 30fps setting is particularly telling: beyond creating thousands of near-identical images and editorial headaches, it forces unpredictable card changes that could cause a photographer to miss genuinely important moments. Professional photographers typically avoid burst mode during long events specifically to prevent being caught changing cards when something significant happens. There was no time for reactive photography; these settings represent preparation for exactly the type of ultra-high-speed event that occurred.

Here is what war photojournalist Michael Yon had to say, “This would be the perfect setting to capture, say, a subject’s ‘head exploding.’”

My thought exactly. But then, I’m not a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist either. It is entirely possible that Mills just likes to shoot totally static situations as if they were exploding, but Yon does have that experience shooting scenes of combat and he says he’s never shot anything at this speed.