Timescape

Some of the best Star Trek episodes involve time: freezing it, traveling through it, jumping between various versions of it, and so on. The exploration of time in the context of a science fiction show where anything is possible, limited only by the imagination of the writers, is fertile ground for some incredible storylines that go well beyond the simple idea of galavanting across the galaxy while shooting lasers at Romulans. There’s a particular frozen-in-time scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation that has stuck with me for decades, and was certainly on my mind as I took this photo. Midway through the Season 6 episode Timescape, some of the crew come across a warp core breach in progress but, in a bit of a twist that can only happen in the realm of science fiction, extremely slowly. An incident that would normally happen in the blink of an eye is instead unfolding over the course of several hours, and Picard is so dumbfounded at the thought of the Enterprise exploding that he loses his mind for a bit and proceeds to, in one of the show’s stranger moments, draw a smiley face in the cloud of gas bursting forth from the dilithium chamber. The warp core, as Commander Data explained, has already exploded. The chain reaction is set, and nothing can be done to stop the sequence of events about to unfold. The only reason it appears to be paused to Picard, Data, and Troi is that they are merely experiencing it in ultra-slow motion.

The point is, and I don’t mean to get too sidetracked here, that taking a photograph is not too dissimilar from this fictional event. A singular mark in time is captured when you press the shutter, but even if the image is tack sharp it’s important to remember that time has not been captured in a frozen state. Even at 1/100 or 1/1000 of a second, a photograph is recording the passage of actual time–just slowed way down. And that, as it just so happens, brings us to this week’s featured photo.

If you think that this picture somewhat resembles an explosion, you’re not wrong. What you’re seeing is a small clump of seeds in the process of slowly expanding over the course of several days. Not long before this shot was taken, this was a ball about the size of a pencil eraser with some spiky protrustions all across its surface. A day or two later the spiny shape you see here will be a small stalk of grass with several tiny seed pods dangling from its tip. And during the in-between time, you get what you see in today’s shot: an explosion in slow motion, captured in a single photograph. It’s essentially the same as what Captain Picard saw, or will see hundreds of years from now, in the Engineering deck of the Enterprise.

To get this shot I positioned my Nikon D750 and and 105mm macro lens on a very tiny tripod a couple of inches away from the exploding ball of seeds, which was about a half-inch in diameter.

I used a two-second delay timer to minimize camera shake, and an aperture of f/32 to keep depth of field under control and get as sharp of an image as possible. I also shot with the sun behind the subject in order to get some backlighting, which helped accentuate the sharp edges and detailed textures that you wouldn’t see if the light was behind the camera.

One final fun note is that this was all in my own yard. I didn’t have to travel anywhere to get this shot–just keep my eyes open for what was right in front of me.