Spotting a speeding bullet with your naked eye is almost impossible, and normal photographic flash units can’t truly capture the impact that a bullet makes after hitting an object. Flickr user alan_sailer knows a thing or two about high speed photography – not only does his super-duper flash unit produces a flash of light around a microsecond (a millionth of a second) but his setup also uses an automatic trigger mechanism.

His photographs are taken in darkness, and as the bullet passes through a laser beam, the flash is triggered, and the image is captured. Here’s a small gallery of this shots:

See more of alan_sailer’s photography on Flickr.

[via futurebackwards on Twitter]