A good shot at life

This branch of scientific photography helps keep you safe in a car smash.

The camera rolls, a car hits a wall and the airbags activate. It's not just another day on a movie set but a controlled test car crash, and the “director” is Peter McManammy. For two days before the crash he will have put 15 to 20 cameras around the car, underneath, above and inside, making sure every angle is covered.

And there can't be any camera failures, McManammy says.

“Some tests are worth about $100,000 and if some of the cameras fail, the test would be void and we would have to repeat it,” he says.

Last year, about 1500 camera takes were shot, with only six failures.

McManammy is a scientific photographer whose job is to use high-speed photography to capture every millisecond of a test crash.

This less glamorous branch of photography concentrates on recording things exactly as they are, either at high speed or high magnification, usually for research or scientific purposes.

Melbourne-based McManammy's work is part of the painstaking side of test crash photography at Autoliv, Campbellfield, one of only two commercial test crash centres in Australia. A third crash lab is at General Motors Holden's proving ground at Lang Lang.

For test crashes McManammy uses digital cameras to record the crash at 1000 frames per second. He says at that camera speed it is possible to watch an airbag come out frame by frame, see how it interacts with the dummy, watch the way the car crumples and if the dummy occupant hits its head on the windscreen. But the work doesn't end when the test is complete.

McManammy uses a still camera and records before and after the crash, a little like a crime-scene investigator.

“I am looking for anything unusual, the position of the test dummies and damage to the car,” McManammy says.

“Everything is done to regulation so the dummies' feet are put into position to the millimetre as are the head and hips. I also record distances from the camera back to the car to be used for film analysis ... displacement velocity, the speed of the dummy going forward and being slowed down by the airbag, can be measured later.”

Once the test is completed the film is handed to engineers for analysis.