You're eating a Fourth of July hot dog and—BOOM!—a firework causes you to drop it. No worries. A quick pick-up and you're safe to start eating again, right? Wrong.

According to food-science research at Clemson University, there is no five-second rule. It's the zero-second rule. Writes Catherine Barker in our July issue, "salmonella and other bacteria can survive up to four weeks on dry surfaces and transfer to food immediately upon contact."

The Clemson study tested bologna and bread, so in our photo studio, I loaded an open-faced bologna sandwich with mustard, took aim, and—SPLAT!—dropped it onto a slab of parquet flooring. The result: FAIL. Too much baloney, not enough splat. I made a more mustardy sandwich and tried again (below).

We were pretty happy with this second splat, but we shot dozens of variations to be sure: different angles, multiple splats, more mustard, less mustard, two slices of bread, no bread at all. Photo editor Susan Welchman even suggested shooting some sandwiches with a bite missing. Guess who got that job.

***

On my way home that night, doubt began to set in. "Who eats bologna sandwiches?" I wondered. "Since this page is for July," I wrote in an email to Susan, "we should try a half-eaten hot dog nose-diving into the white floor of our page."

Susan was game as was staff photographer Mark Thiessen. So we got back in the studio, this time armed with hot dogs, buns, mustard, relish, and ketchup. Once Mark set my target, I dressed a dog, took a bite, and dropped it bite-down onto a sheet of white formica (below). FAIL. We might as well have been photographing vomit.

We needed to freeze the point of impact, not the filthy aftermath. Mark's solution: a sound timer. We turned off all the lights in the room and opened the camera's shutter. Then we made a noise (in this case, the sound of a thrown hot dog hitting the floor). The noise triggered the timer, which set off a flash to freeze the action. By setting a delay on the timer in split-second increments, we could control the exact point at which the flash fired to capture the crashing hot dog (below). Cool, right?

In theory, yes, but in practice, the sound of bun hitting formica wasn't loud enough. For more consistent results, we upgraded to a laser timer. Laser timers work like sound timers, except the flash fires when an object (again, a thrown hot dog) disrupts the path of a laser beam. This started to work really well. Bits of relish were captured in mid-flight (see top of this post).

The new problem was my aim. My throws kept landing at the wrong angle. After a few hours of hot dog throwing, we were all out of buns—and patience.

***

The next day, Mark moved our set to a tabletop and rigged a chute of PVC pipe directly above the laser beam (above). That way, when the lights were off, all I had to do was stand on a stool and drop the dogs down the pipe to hit the laser vertically every time. We took thirteen shots and called these dogs done. Time to test the images on a page.

In hindsight, every process has its pitfalls; all that matters is the end result. Three days, nearly 100 frames and about thirty hot dogs later, we chose the image with the most impact: the second SPLAT from the first day.

—Oliver Uberti

Photos: Mark Thiessen (hot dogs) and Rebecca Hale (bologna), NG Staff

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