How can one capture gun bore shots?

Question

How can one capture shots like this where a long, small tube like a gun bore is evenly illuminated along its length?

In this sample the harsh reflections off the breach suggest it was illuminated from the front, but I can't imagine any means of evenly pumping light into a tube no more than .45" in diameter (and as small as .22") while at the same time having the lens centered on the bore's axis, which is necessary to get its full length.

Update: In response to answers so far I did some experiments with single exposures on a comparable barrel. I pasted details as a separate answer below.

Answer 1

I can see two possible ways this shot was done:

1. Light was injected where the cartridge would go. We can't really see what is back there in the picture. Some LEDs could have been carefully placed inside or almost inside the gun, and the wires run so that they would be obscured in the picture.

2. A beam splitting mirror was used. The camera was looking thru a beam splitting mirror. A light source was then bounced off the mirror face away from the camera. This allows the light to be shined in-line with the view axis of the picture. You have to make sure that what the camera sees reflecting off the mirror doesn't show up in the picture. Note that the light source will illuminate whatever object you put there too. This is why you put something flat black there. A large dark open area also works since the light will have diminishing effect on distant objects.

Answer 2

The photographer shows and discusses his lighting set up here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29689383@N02/5615386358/in/photolist-9ydjJb

Also, he mentioned elsewhere that he uses focus stacking.

Answer 3

When reverse engineering a lighting setup always apply the principal of Occam's Razor:

among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

Before introducing exotic lenses or beam splitting mirrors, let's examine the requirement for the incoming light to be perfectly aligned to the lens axis.

The bore is made of metal, and metal reflects light very well. If you shine a bright light into the barrel from any direction then it will bounce around inside illuminating the length of the barrel, removing the on axis restriction.

I don't know enough about firearms to say whether light could be introduced from the rear (presumably the same way the bullet enters the barrel), but again applying Occam's Razor, the simplest way is through the front!

The solution that seems simplest to me would be a multiple exposure with one bright light angled to illuminate inside the barrel, and a second designed to light up the front of the pistol. It's possible even that this was a single exposure, place a black plastic sheet touching the muzzle with small hole where the barrel is, hit it with a powerful strobe from and angle and whilst keeping the shutter open remove the sheet and let the ambient light burn in over several seconds. But a multiple exposure is simpler.

Answer 4

This is just a guess and may not be the way these photos were created, but one way to produce such a shot would be with a mirror lens. A mirror lens is a catadioptric system similar to a Schmidt-Cassegrain or Maksutov telescope. All of these systems have a fairly large secondary mirror placed in the center of the main objective lens and all of the light entering the lens does so through a donut shaped opening around the secondary mirror in the center. A small light or flash placed in front of the secondary mirror on the center of the lens' optical axis could illuminate the barrel and the other parts fof the gun in the breech behind the barrel.

Here is one such lens mounted on a Sony Alpha 55:

For more about mirror lenses, please see What kind of mirror in a mirror lens?

Additionally, to get that kind of Depth of Field some form of focus stacking was likely used.

Answer 5

Another possibility is that it could be actually two exposures edited into one. For the hole, a long exposure could be used that captures the ambient light and from the tip outside is a regular exposure.

It could also be a very long lens with two or more light sources on opposite sides of it to avoid shadows, again with two exposures, because the rest of the gun does not seem to be illuminated by them.

Answer 6

I did some experiments on a 9mm pistol barrel, which is 20% narrower than the .45 used in the reference photo. The barrel I used was potentially 1 inch longer than his (I used a 5.3"; he may have used a standard 5" 1911 or a 4.25" Commander-length).

I used a 300mm lens placed at the minimal focal distance (5 feet) and ran it with minimal aperture (f32-f40). Even with that aperture the focal plane is not quite deep enough to get the barrel in focus from breech to muzzle, suggesting that focus stacking is necessary.

Anyway, using ambient light a single 30s exposure produces this:

Using two flashlights held as close to the lens barrel as possible produces this 1s exposure:

Update: I went back to this with a new 90mm macro, illuminated through the chamber from above with the slide open, and stacked three shots taken at f/22 in Photoshop. I'm satisfied that with a lot of careful tuning one could produce something like what was proposed. Here's the result:

Another Update: I got a 35% reflective beam splitter and tested the following setup with a 60mm macro lens:

This does indeed seem to be a viable solution to coaxial illumination, producing the following image at f/20:

Answer 7

I think the photo you're trying to imitate is a composite, for the simple reason that the face of the closed bolt in a M1911 sits a bit further away from the muzzle than the trigger guard. There is no way the muzzle, the face of the bolt, and the entire bore could be in sharp focus, while the front of the trigger guard is not.