The bubble burst

To the human eye the bursting of a bubble is a simple affair. One prod of a finger and - pop! - it’s vanished in a split second.

But as these breathtaking pictures show, the process is spectacular - if only we could see it.
These images were taken with a slow-motion camera to show every stage of the soap bubble’s disappearance.

Richard Heeks spent weeks capturing his images of the bursting of a bubble: This is how it begins.

A tiny prod with a fingertip and the delicate surface of the bubble is broken

Photographer Richard Heeks, from Exeter, used a fast shutter speed of 1/500th of a second and chose a perfect wind-free day so nothing would disturb his shoot, while his wife Sarah provided the all-important finger.
A bubble is made up of three layers - one thin layer of water sandwiched between two layers of soap molecules.
As Mrs Heeks’s finger breaks the surface tension, the perfect sphere is replaced by a round mass of soapy droplets which dissolve into the air. And the bubble is gone.
Mr Heeks, a student, used a macro camera to get in close and had to wait patiently for a windless day.
He even had to find a sheltered spot in his garden so any sudden gust would not disturb the shoot.

As the droplets begin to fall away only a small part of the bubble’s surface is left intact

It took him a month until he got the sequence right after seeing his nieces playing with bubble mixture.

‘I was looking ideas for new things to photograph and I just thought the bubbles looked beautiful and with a bit of luck I managed to get one mid burst,’ he said.

‘That’s what started it off.

‘One day I was so absorbed in the project I didn’t notice a group of builders watching me. I think I must have looked a bit of an idiot, but maybe they thought it was fascinating. Who knows, because I got embarrassed and scuttled back into the house.’

A bubble is actually made up of three layers - one thin layer of water sandwiched between two layers of soap molecules. No matter what the shape the bubble is initially, it will always try to become a sphere because it as the smallest surface area and requires the least amount of energy to achieve. The biggest bubble ever blown was 50 feet by 2 feet in diameter. It was achieved by David Stein from New York in 1988.