Better Photography Magazine Cover — The Story Behind an Iconic Shot

I was always fascinated by heroes smashing through glass windows in movies. I had seen it a hundred times. It was relatively easy to capture the drama in cinema, where you had movement and a sequence of frames, but I often wondered — could that entire effect be captured in a single still photograph? 
The impact, the intensity and the drama — all frozen in one frame.

One bottle. One shot. The experimental action photograph that became a Better Photography magazine cover. 
Photography: Pravin Talan.

Around that time, I was experimenting with a medium-format camera and wanted to see how well it could handle action. Somehow the two thoughts came together. If I really wanted to test it, why not try something difficult — capture the precise moment a bottle smashed over someone's head?

Initially, it sounded simple enough. Break a bottle, time the action and catch the moment.

I got in touch with someone who specialised in making breakaway bottles for action sequences in Bollywood films. He made two bottles for us, and I remember they were quite expensive for an experiment. The man I chose to photograph had an extraordinary build and wonderfully intense expressions. He looked tough enough for the picture, though in reality he was an extremely simple man.

The real problem was timing.

The medium-format camera wasn't particularly fast at focusing, and there were too many things that needed to happen at almost exactly the same moment — the swing of the bottle, the impact, the breaking bottle, the flying fragments and water, and the expression on his face.

At first, I thought my assistant could break the bottle over his head while he reacted to the impact. My assistant was this tiny little girl, which somehow made the visual even more interesting. We started practising with a plastic water bottle, but something wasn't working. She would hit, he would react, and I realised that by the time I pressed the shutter I could lose either the breaking bottle or the expression.

So I changed the idea.

Instead of someone breaking the bottle on his head, I imagined him in a moment of complete anger and frustration — screaming and smashing the bottle on his own head.

That created another problem. The weight of the breakaway bottle was different from our plastic practice bottle, which meant the speed of his movement would also change. We actually got a weighing scale, weighed the bottles and adjusted the amount of water in the plastic bottle until the weights were reasonably similar. Then we kept practising the movement.

And just when we were working everything out, one of the two breakaway bottles broke while it was simply being handed over to us.

I was furious.

Now there was only one bottle left.

I worked out the lighting, anticipated where the water and fragments were likely to travel, and kept thinking about the expression. Finally, I realised he shouldn't wait for the bottle to hit his head before reacting. I told him to start screaming before the action and continue through the entire movement — anger, swing, impact and expression becoming one continuous action.

We did our dry runs until there was nothing more to practise.

One bottle. One shot. One scream.

And somehow, we got it.

I shared the photograph online and the response was quite unexpected. The image travelled rapidly, and Better Photography approached me to put it on the cover along with the story of how the photograph had been created.

What started with a simple fascination for those dramatic action moments in cinema — and the question of whether all that intensity could be frozen into a single photograph — had become a Better Photography magazine cover.

Sometimes an exciting photograph begins with nothing more complicated than a thought:

Let's see if this works.

Photography: Pravin Talan

Please do not attempt to recreate this photograph without appropriate professional guidance and safety precautions.