Painstakingly layering paint on an inflated balloon and popping it. Simple and fun right? Even better you’d agree when you’ve got a camera at the ready to capture the exact moment in time to visualise the latex medium explode and its new skin of colour merge and soar through the air. Yes, better. Fabian Oefner did just that. Without speaking with Oefner, artist of the photographic exhibition Liquid Jewels, we can only assume that his thought process mirrored ours. Not to be done at home (could you imagine?!), Oefner took a MacGyver-style approach for the project. Finding the technology required to capture such a slight moment unaffordable, he short-circuited a handful of flashes so that they’d light up for just 1/40,000th of a second (by comparison, the average human will blink in 0.1 second). He then connected these flashes to a microphone and somehow programmed lights to burst only when they detected the sound of the exploding balloon. Not the easiest of tasks, given I can’t seem to program my alarm to get up in the morning properly. With this genius home-made system, Oefner was able to capture only one photograph per explosion. We’re unsure how many balloons the poor man went through, but the result I’m sure you’d agree is amazing.